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WHITE COLLAR
The American Middle Classes
J>
WHITE
COLLAR
The American Middle Classes
by C. Wright Mills
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON OXFORD NEW YORK
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford London New York
Glasgow Toronto Melbourne Wellington
Cape Town Salisbury Ibadan Nairobi Lusaka Addis Ababa
Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Lahore Dacca
Kuala Lumpur Hong Kong Tokyo
Copyright 1951 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
First published by Oxford University Press, New York, 1951
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1956
This reprint, 1969
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Ur
Contents
Introduction, ix
ONE: OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
1. The World of the Small Entrepreneur, 3
1. The Old Middle Classes, 3
2. Property, Freedom and Security, 7
3. The Self-Balancing Society, 9
2. The Transformation of Property, 13
1. The Rural Debacle, 15
2. Business Dynamics, 20
3. The Lumpen-Bourgeoisie, 28
3. The Rhetoric of Competition, 34
1. The Competitive Way of Life, 35
2. The Independent Farmer, 40
3. The Small Business Front, 44
4. Political Persistence, 54
TWO: WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
4. The New Middle Class: I, 63
1. Occupational Change, 63
2. Industrial Mechanics, 65
3. White-Collar Pyramids, 70
5. The Managerial Demiurge, 77
1. The Bureaucracies, 78
2. From the Top to the Bottom, 81
3. The Case of the Foreman, 87
4. The New Entrepreneur, 91
5. The Power of the Managers, 100
6. Three Trends, 106
vi CONTENTS
6. Old Professions and New Skills, 112
1. The Professions and Bureaucracy, 113
2. The Medical World, 115
3. Lawyers, 121
4. The Professors, 129
5. Business and the Professions, 136
7. Brains, inc., 142
1. Four Phases, 144
2. The Bureaucratic Context, 149
3. The Ideological Demand, 153
4. The Rise of the Technician, 156
8. The Great Salesroom, 161
1. Types of Salesmen, 161
2. The Biggest Bazaar in the World, 166
3. Buyers and Floorwalkers, 169
4. The Salesgirls, 172
5. The Centralization of Salesmanship, 178
6. The Personality Market, 182
9. The Enormous File, 189
1. The Old Office, 190
2. Forces and Developments, 192
3. The White-Collar Girl, 198
4. The New Office, 204
5. The White-Collar Hierarchy, 209
THREE: STYLES OF LIFE
10. Work, 215
1. Meanings of Work, 215
2. The Ideal of Craftsmanship, 220
3. The Conditions of Modern Work, 224
4. Frames of Acceptance, 229
5. The Morale of the Cheerful Robots, 233
6. The Big Split, 235
11. The Status Panic, 239
1. White-Collar Prestige, 240
2. The Smaller City, 250
3. The Metropolis, 251
4. The Status Panic, 254
CONTENTS
12. Success, 259
1. Patterns and Ideologies, 259
2. The Educational Elevator, 265
3. Origins and Mobilities, 272
4. Hard Times, 278
5. The Tarnished Image, 282
FOUR: WAYS OF POWER
13. The New Middle Class: II, 289
1. Theories and Difficulties, 290
2. Mentahties, 294
3. Organizations, 298
14. White-Collar Unionism, 301
1. The Extent Organized, 302
2. Acceptance and Rejection, 304
3. Individual Involvement, 308
4. The Shape of Unionism, 314
5. Unions and Politics, 320
15. The Politics of the Rearguard, 324
1. Models of Consciousness, 324
2. Political Indifference, 327
3. The Mass Media, 332
4. The Social Structure, 340
5. U.S. Politics, 342
6. The Rearguarders, 350
Acknowledgments and Sources, 355
Index, 365
No one could suspect that times
were coming . . . when the man who
chd not gamble would lose all the
time, even more surely than he who
gambled.'
CHARLES PEGUY
Introduction
I HE white-collar people slipped quietly into modern society.
Whatever history they have had is a history without events; what-
ever common interests they have do not lead to unity; what-
ever future they have will not be of their own making. If they
aspire at all it is to a middle course, at a time when no middle
course is available, and hence to an illusory course in an imagi-
nary society. Internally, they are split, fragmented; externally,
they are dependent on larger forces. Even if they gained the
will to act, their actions, being unorganized, would be less a
movement than a tangle of unconnected contests. As a group,
they do not threaten anyone; as individuals, they do not practice
an independent way of life. So before an adequate idea of them
could be formed, they have been taken for granted as familiar
actors of the urban mass.
Yet it is to this white-collar world that one must look for much
that is characteristic of twentieth-century existence. By their rise
to numerical importance, the white-collar people have upset the
nineteenth-century expectation that society would be divided
between entrepreneurs and wage workers. By their mass way of
life, they have transformed the tang and feel of the American
experience. They carry, in a most revealing way, many of those
psychological themes that characterize our epoch, and, in one
way or another, every general theory of the main drift has had
to take account of them. For above all else they are a new
cast of actors, performing the major routines of twentieth-cen-
tury society:
At the top of the white-collar world, the old captain of industry
X INTRODUCTION
hands over his tasks to the manager of the corporation. Alongside
the poHtician, with his string tie and ready tongue, the salaried
bureaucrat, with brief case and slide rule, rises into political
view. These top managers now command hierarchies of anony-
mous middle managers, floorwalkers, salaried foremen, county
agents, federal inspectors, and police investigators trained in the
law.
In the established professions, the doctor, lawyer, engineer,
once was free and named on his own shingle; in the new white-
collar world, the salaried specialists of the clinic, the junior part-
ners in the law factory, the captive engineers of the corporation
have begun to challenge free professional leadership. The old
professions of medicine and law are still at the top of the profes-
sional world, but now all around them are men and women
of new skills. There are a dozen kinds of social engineers and
mechanical technicians, a multitude of girl Fridays, laboratory
assistants, registered and unregistered nurses, draftsmen, statis-
ticians, social workers.
In the salesrooms, which sometimes seem to coincide with the
new society as a whole, are the stationary salesgirls in the de-
partment store, the mobile salesmen of insurance, the absentee
salesmen— ad-men helping others sell from a distance. At the top
are the prima donnas, the vice presidents who say that they are
'merely salesmen, although perhaps a little more creative than
others,' and at the bottom, the five-and-dime clerks, selling com-
modities at a fixed price, hoping soon to leave the job for mar-
riage.
In the enormous file of the oflBce, in all the calculating rooms,
accountants and purchasing agents replace the man who did his
own figuring. And in the lower reaches of the white-collar world,
ofiice operatives grind along, loading and emptying the filing
system; there are private secretaries and typists, entry clerks,
billing clerks, corresponding clerks— a thousand kinds of clerks;
the operators of light machinery, comptometers, dictaphones,
addressographs; and the receptionists to let you in or keep you
out.
Images of white-collar types are now part of the literature
of every major industrial nation: Hans Fallada presented the
INTRODUCTION xi
Pinnebergs to pre-Hitler Germany. Johannes Pinneberg, a book-
keeper trapped by inflation, depression, and wife with child,
ends up in the economic gutter, with no answer to the question,
'Little Man, What Now?'— except support by a genuinely prole-
tarian wife. J. B. Priestley created a gallery of tortured and in-
secure creatures from the white-collar world of London in Angel
Pavement. Here are people who have been stood up by life:
what they most desire is forbidden them by reason of what they
are. George Orwell's Mr. Bowling, a salesman in Coming Up
for Air, speaks for them all, perhaps, when he says: 'There's a
lot of rot talked about the sufferings of the working class. I'm
not so sorry for the proles myself. . . The prole suffers physically,
but he's a free man when he isn't working. But in every one of
those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never
free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the
boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal
at him. Of course the basic trouble with people like us is that we
all imagine we've got something to lose.'
Kitty Foyle is perhaps the closest American counterpart of
these European novels. But how different its heroine is! In Amer-
ica, unlike Europe, the fate of white-collar types is not yet clear.
A modernized Horatio Alger heroine, Kitty Foyle (like Alice
Adams before her) has aspirations up the Main Line. The book
ends, in a depression year, with Kitty earning $3000 a year,
about to buy stock in her firm, and hesitating over marrying a
doctor who happens to be a Jew. While Herr Pinneberg in Ger-
many was finding out, too late, that his proletarian wife was at
once his life fate and his political chance, Kitty Foyle was busy
pursuing an American career in the cosmetics business. But
twenty-five years later, during the American postwar boom Willy
Loman appears, the hero of The Death of a Salesman, the white-
collar man who by the very virtue of his moderate success in
business turns out to be a total failure in life. Frederic Wertham
has written of Willy Loman's dream: 'He succeeds with it; he
fails with it; he dies with it. But why did he have this dream?
Isn't it true that he had to have a false dream in our society?'
The nineteenth-century farmer and businessman were gen-
erally thought to be stalwart individuals— their own men, men
xii INTRODUCTION
who could quickly grow to be almost as big as anyone else. The
twentieth-century white-collar man has never been independent
as the farmer used to be, nor as hopeful of the main chance as
the businessman. He is always somebody's man, the corpora-
tion's, the government's, the army's; and he is seen as the man
who does not rise. The decline of the free entrepreneur and the
rise of the dependent employee on the American scene has paral-
leled the decline of the independent individual and the rise of
the little man in the American mind.
In a world crowded with big ugly forces, the white-collar man
is readily assumed to possess all the supposed virtues of the small
creature. He may be at the bottom of the social world, but he is,
at the same time, gratifyingly middle class. It is easy as well as
safe to sympathize with his troubles; he can do little or noth-
ing about them. Other social actors threaten to become big and
aggressive, to act out of selfish interests and deal in politics. The
big businessman continues his big-business-as-usual through
the normal rhythm of slump and war and boom; the big labor
man, lifting his shaggy eyebrows, holds up the nation until his
demands are met; the big farmer cultivates the Senate to see that
big farmers get theirs. But not the white-collar man. He is more
often pitiful than tragic, as he is seen collectively, fighting im-
personal inflation, living out in slow misery his yearning for the
quick American climb. He is pushed by forces beyond his con-
trol, pulled into movements he does not understand; he gets into
situations in which his is the most helpless position. The white-
collar man is the hero as victim, the small creature who is acted
upon but who does not act, who works along unnoticed in some-
body's office or store, never talking loud, never talking back,
never taking a stand.
When the focus shifts from the generalized Little Man to spe-
cific white-collar types whom the public encounters, the images
become diverse and often unsympathetic. Sympathy itself often
carries a sharp patronizing edge; the word 'clerk,' for example,
is likely to be preceded by 'merely.' Who talks willingly to the
insurance agent, opens the door to the bill collector? 'Everybody
knows how rude and nasty salesgirls can be.' Schoolteachers ara
standard subjects for businessmen's jokes. The housewife's opin
INTRODUCTION xiii
ion of private secretaries is not often friendly— indeed, much of
white-collar fiction capitalizes on her hostility to 'the office wife.'
These are images of specific white-collar types seen from
above. But from below, for two generations sons and daughters
of the poor have looked forward eagerly to becoming even 'mere'
clerks. Parents have sacrificed to have even one child finish high
school, business school, or college so that he could be the assist-
ant to the executive, do the filing, type the letter, teach school,
work in the government office, do something requiring technical
skills: hold a white-collar job. In serious literature white-collar
images are often subjects for lamentation; in popular writing
they are often targets of aspiration.
Images of American types have not been built carefully by
piecing together live experience. Here, as elsewhere, they have
been made up out of tradition and schoolbook and the early,
easy drift of the unalerted mind. And they have been reinforced
and even created, especially in white-collar times, by the editorial
machinery of popular amusement and mass communications.
Manipulations by professional image-makers are efi^ective be-
cause their audiences do not or cannot know personally all the
people they want to talk about or be like, and because they have
an unconscious need to believe in certain types. In their need
and inexperience, such audiences snatch and hold to the glimpses
of types that are frozen into the language with which they see
the world. Even when they meet the people behind the types
face to face, previous images, linked deeply with feeling, blind
them to what stands before them. Experience is trapped by
false images, even as reality itself sometimes seems to imitate the
soap opera and the publicity release.
Perhaps the most cherished national images are sentimental
versions of historical types that no longer exist, if indeed they
ever did. Underpinning many standard images of The American
is the myth, in the words of the eminent historian, A. M. Schles-
inger, Sr., of the 'long tutelage to the soil' which, as 'the chief
formative influence,' results in 'courage, creative energy and re-
sourcefulness. . .' According to this idea, which clearly bears a
nineteenth-century trademark. The American possesses magical
independence, homely ingenuity, great capacity for work, all of
xiv INTRODUCTION
which virtues he attained while strugghng to subdue the vast
continent.
One hundred years ago, when three-fourths of the people were
farmers, there may have been some justification for engraving
such an image and calling it The American. But since then, farm-
ers have declined to scarcely more than one-tenth of the occu-
pied populace, and new classes of salaried employees and wage-
workers have risen. Deep-going historic changes resulting in
wide diversities have long challenged the nationalistic historian
who would cling to The American as a single type of ingenious
farmer-artisan. In so far as universals can be found in life and
character in America, they are due less to any common tutelage
of the soil than to the leveling influences of urban civilization,
and above all, to the standardization of the big technology and
of the media of mass communication.
America is neither the nation of horse-traders and master
builders of economic theory, nor the nation of go-getting, claim-
jumping, cattle-rustling pioneers of frontier mythology. Nor have
the traits rightly or wrongly associated with such historic types
carried over into the contemporary population to any noticeable
degree. Only a fraction of this population consists of free private
enterprisers in any economic sense; there are now four times as
many wage-workers and salary workers as independent entre-
preneurs. 'The struggle for life,' William Dean Howells wrote in
the 'nineties, 'has changed from a free fight to an encounter of
disciplined forces, and the free fighters that are left get ground
to pieces. . .'
If it is assumed that white-collar employees represent some
sort of continuity with the old middle class of entrepreneurs,
then it may be said that for the last hundred years the middle
classes have been facing the slow expropriation of their holdings,
and that for the last twenty years they have faced the spectre
of unemployment. Both assertions rest on facts, but the facts have
not been experienced by the middle class as a double crisis. The
property question is not an issue to the new middle class of the
present generation. That was fought out, and lost, before World
War I, by the old middle class. The centralization of small prop-
erties is a development that has afi^ected each generation back to
our great-grandfathers, reaching its climax in the Progressive Era.
rNTRODUCTION xv
It has been a secular trend of too slow a tempo to be felt as a
continuing crisis by middle-class men and women, who often
seem to have become more commodity-minded than property-
minded. Yet history is not always enacted consciously; if expro-
priation is not felt as crisis, still it is a basic fact in the ways of
life and the aspirations of the new middle class; and the facts of
unemployment are felt as fears, hanging over the white-collar
world.
By examining white-collar life, it is possible to learn something
about what is becoming more typically 'American' than the fron-
tier character probably ever was. What must be grasped is the
picture of society as a great salesroom, an enormous file, an in-
corporated brain, a new universe of management and manipula-
tion. By understanding these diverse white-collar worlds, one
can also understand better the shape and meaning of modem
society as a whole, as well as the simple hopes and complex
anxieties that grip all the people who are sweating it out in the
middle of the twentieth century.
The troubles that confront the white-collar people are the
troubles of all men and women living in the twentieth century.
If these troubles seem particularly bitter to the new middle strata,
perhaps that is because for a brief time these people felt them-
selves immune to troubles.
Before the First World War there were fewer little men, and
in their brief monopoly of high-school education they were in
fact protected from many of the sharper edges of the workings
of capitalist progress. They were free to entertain deep illusions
about their individual abilities and about the collective trust-
worthiness of the system. As their number has grown, however,
they have become increasingly subject to wage-worker condi-
tions. Especially since the Great Depression have white-collar
people come up against all the old problems of capitalist society.
They have been racked by slump and war and even by boom.
They have learned about impersonal unemployment in depres-
sions and about impersonal death by technological violence in
war. And in good times, as prices rose faster than salaries, the
money they thought they were making was silently taken away
from them.
xvi INTRODUCTION
The material hardship of nineteenth-century industrial workers
finds its parallel on the psychological level among twentieth-
century white-collar employees. The new Little Man seems^ to
have no firm roots, no sure loyalties to sustain his life and give it
a center. He is not aware of having any history, his past being
as brief as it is unheroic; he has lived through no golden age he
can recall in time of trouble. Perhaps because he does not know
where he is going, he is in a frantic hurry; perhaps because he
does not know what frightens him, he is paralyzed with fear.
This is especially a feature of his political life, where the paralysis
results in the most profound apathy of modern times.
The uneasiness, the malaise of our time, is due to this root fact:
in our politics and economy, in family life and religion— in prac-
tically every sphere of our existence— the certainties of the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries have disintegrated or been de-
stroyed and, at the same time, no new sanctions or justifications
for the new routines we live, and must live, have taken hold. So
there is no acceptance and there is no rejection, no sweeping
hope and no sweeping rebellion. There is no plan of life. Among
white-collar people, the malaise is deep-rooted; for the absence
of any order of belief has left them morally defenseless as indi-
viduals and politically impotent as a group. Newly created in
a harsh time of creation, white-collar man has no culture to lean
upon except the contents of a mass society that has shaped him
and seeks to manipulate him to its alien ends. For security's
sake, he must strain to attach himself somewhere, but no com-
munities or organizations seem to be thoroughly his. This iso-
lated position makes him excellent material for synthetic mold-
ing at the hands of popular culture— print, film, radio, and tele-
vision. As a metropolitan dweller, he is especially open to the
focused onslaught of all the manufactured loyalties and dis-
tractions that are contrived and urgently pressed upon those
who live in worlds they never made.
In the case of the white-collar man, the alienation of the wage-
worker from the products of his work is carried one step nearer
to its Kafka-like completion. The salaried employee does not
make anything, although he may handle much that he greatly
desires but cannot have. No product of craftsmanship can be his
to contemplate with pleasure as it is being created and after it
INTRODUCTION xvii
is made. Being alienated from any product of his labor, and
going year after year through the same paper routine, he turns
his leisure all the more frenziedly to the ersatz diversion that is
sold him, and partakes of the synthetic excitement that neither
eases nor releases. He is bored at work and restless at play, and
this terrible alternation wears him out.
In his work he often clashes with customer and superior, and
must almost always be the standardized loser: he must smile
and be personable, standing behind the counter, or waiting in
the outer oflBce. In many strata of white-collar employment, such
traits as courtesy, helpfulness, and kindness, once intimate, are
now part of the impersonal means of livelihood. Self-ahenation
is thus an accompaniment of his alienated labor.
When white-collar pepple get jobs, they sell not only their time
and energy but their personalities as well. They sell by the week
or month their smiles and their kindly gestures, and they must
practice the prompt repression of resentment and aggression. For
these intimate traits are of commercial relevance and required
for the more eflBcient and profitable distribution of goods and
services. Here are the new little Machiavellians, practicing their
personable crafts for hire and for the profit of others, according
to rules laid down by those above them.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rationahty was
identified with freedom. The ideas of Freud about the individual,
and of Marx about society, were strengthened by the assumption
of the coincidence of freedom and rationality. Now rationality
seems to have taken on a new form, to have its seat not in indi-
vidual men, but in social institutions which by their bureaucratic
planning and mathematical foresight usurp both freedom and
rationality from the little individual men caught in them. The
calculating hierarchies of department store and industrial cor-
poration, of rationalized office and governmental bureau, lay out
the gray ways of work and stereotype the permitted initiatives.
And in all this bureaucratic usurpation of freedom and of ration-
ahty, the white-collar people are the interchangeable parts of the
big chains of authority that bind the society together.
White-collar people, always visible but rarely seen, are politi-
cally voiceless. Stray politicians wandering in the political arena
without party may put 'white collar' people alongside business-
xvJIf INTRODUCTION
men, farmers, and wage-workers in their broadside appeals, but
no platform of either major party has yet referred to them di-
rectly. Who fears the clerk? Neither Alice Adams nor Kitty Foyle
could be a Grapes of Wrath for the 'share-croppers in the dust
bowl of business.'
But while practical politicians, still living in the ideological air
of the nineteenth century, have paid little attention to the new
middle class, theoreticians of the left have vigorously claimed the
salaried employee as a potential proletarian, and theoreticians of
the right and center have hailed him as a sign of the continuing
bulk and vigor of the middle class. Stray heretics from both
camps have even thought, from time to time, that the higher-ups
of the white-collar world might form a center of initiative for
new political beginnings. In Germany, the 'black-coated worker'
was one of the harps that Hitler played on his way to power.
In England, the party of labor is thought to have won electoral
socialism by capturing the votes of the suburban salaried workers.
To the question, what political direction will the white-collar
people take, there are as many answers as there are theorists. Yet
to the observer of American materials, the political problem
posed by these people is not so much what the direction may be
as whether they will take any political direction at all.
Between the little man's consciousness and the issues of our
epoch there seems to be a veil of indifference. His will seems
numbed, his spirit meager. Other men of other strata are also
politically indifferent, but electoral victories are imputed to them;
they do have tireless pressure groups and excited captains who
work in and around the hubs of power, to whom, it may be imag-
ined, they have delegated their enthusiasm for public affairs. But
white-collar people are scattered along the rims of all the wheels
of power: no one is enthusiastic about them and, like political
eunuchs, they themselves are without potency and without en-
thusiasm for the lu-gent political clash.
Estranged from community and society in a context of distrust
and manipulation; alienated from work and, on the personality
market, from self; expropriated of individual rationality, and
politically apathetic— these are the new little people, the unwill-
ing vanguard of modern society. These are some of the circum-
INTRODUCTION xix
stances for the acceptance of which their hopeful training has
quite unprepared them.
What men are interested in is not always what is to their in-
terest; the troubles they are aware of are not always the ones
that beset them. It would indeed be a fetish of 'democracy' to
assume that men immediately know their interests and are clearly
aware of the conditions within themselves and their society that
frustrate them and make their efforts misfire. For interests in-
volve not only values felt, but also something of the means by
which these values might be attained. Merely by looking into
himself, an individual can neither clarify his values nor set up
ways for their attainment. Increased awareness is not enough,
for it is not only that men can be unconscious of their situations;
they are often falsely conscious of them. To become more truly
conscious, white-collar people would have to become aware of
themselves as members of new strata practicing new modes of
work and life in modern America. To know what it is possible
to know about their troubles, they would have to connect, within
the going framework, what they are interested in with what is to
their interest.
If only because of its growing numbers, the new middle class
represents a considerable social and political potential, yet there
is more systematic information available on the farmer, the wage-
worker, the Negro, even on the criminal, than on the men and
women of the variegated white-collar worlds. Even the United
States census is now so arranged as to make very difficult a defini-
tive count of these people. Meanwhile, theorizing about the
middle class on the basis of old facts has run to seed, and no
fresh plots of fact have been planted. Yet the human and politi-
cal importance of the white-collar people continues to loom
larger and larger.
Liberalism's ideal was set forth for the domain of small prop-
erty; Marxism's projection, for that of unalienated labor. Now
when labor is everywhere alienated and small property no longer
an anchor of freedom or security, both these philosophies can
characterize modern society only negatively; neither can articu-
late new developments in their own terms. We must accuse both
John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx of having done their work a
XX INTRODUCTION
hundred years ago. What has happened since then cannot be
adequately described as the destruction of the nineteenth-century
world; by now, the outlines of a new society have arisen around
us, a society anchored in institutions the nineteenth century did
not know. The general idea of the new middle class, in all its
vagueness but also in all its ramifications, is an attempt to grasp
these new developments of social structure and human character.
In terms of social philosophy, this book is written on the as-
sumption that the liberal ethos, as developed in the first two dec-
ades of this century by such men as Beard, Dewey, Holmes, is
now often irrelevant, and that the Marxian view, popular in the
American 'thirties, is now often inadequate. However important
and suggestive they may be as beginning points, and both are
that, they do not enable us to understand what is essential to
our time.
We need to characterize American society of the mid-twentieth
century in more psychological terms, for now the problems that
concern us most border on the psychiatric. It is one great
task of social studies today to describe the larger economic and
political situation in terms of its meaning for the inner life and
the external career of the individual, and in doing this to take
into account how the individual often becomes falsely conscious
and blinded. In the welter of the individual's daily experience
the framework of modern society must be sought; within that
framework the psychology of the little man must be formulated.
The first lesson of modern sociology is that the individual can-
not understand his own experience or gauge his own fate without
locating himself within the trends of his epoch and the hfe-
chances of all the individuals of his social layer. To understand
the white-collar people in detail, it is necessary to draw at least
a rough sketch of the social structure of which they are a part.
For the character of any stratum consists in large part of its rela-
tions, or lack of them, with the strata above and below it; its
peculiarities can best be defined by noting its differences from
other strata. The situation of the new middle class, reflecting con-
ditions and styles of life that are borne by elements of both the
new lower and the new upper classes, may be seen as symptom
and symbol of modern society as a whole.
ONE
Old Middle Classes
'Whatever the future may contain, the
past has shown no more excellent social
order than that in which the mass of the
people were the masters of the holdings
which they plowed and of the tools with
which they worked, and could boast . . .
"it is a quietness to a man's mind to live
upon his own and to know his heir cer-
tarn.
R. H. TAvraEY
1
The World
of the Small Entrepreneur
The early history of the middle classes in America is a history
of how the small entrepreneur, the free man of the old middle
classes, came into his time of daylight, of how he fought against
enemies he could see, and of the world he built. The latter-day
history of these old middle classes is, in large part, the history
of how epochal changes on the farm and in the city have trans-
formed him, and of how his world has been splintered and re-
fashioned into an alien shape.
The small entrepreneur built his world along the classic lines
of middle-class capitalism: a remarkable society with a self-bal-
ancing principle, requiring little or no authority at the center, but
only wide-flung traditions and a few safeguards for property.
Here the ideas of the political economist Adam Smith coincided
with those of the political moralist Thomas JeiBFerson; together
they form the ideology of the naturally harmonious world of the
small entrepreneur.
1. The Old Middle Classes
Unlike the European, the American middle classes enter mod-
ern history as a big stratum of small enterprisers. Here the bour-
geoisie exists before and outside of the city. In rural Europe,
Max Weber has written, 'the producer is older than the market'; a
mass of peasants occupy the land, held to it by ancient tradition,
3
4 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
so firmly that even the force of law during later periods never
turn them into rural entrepreneurs in the American sense. In
America, the market is older than the rural producer.
The difference between a peasant mass and a scattering of
farmers is one of the historic differences between the social struc-
tures of Europe and America, and is of signal consequence for
the character of the middle classes on both continents. There they
begin as a narrow stratum in the urban centers; here, as a broad
stratum of free farmers. Throughout the whole of United States
history, the farmer is the numerical ballast of the independent
middle class.
In American society neither peasants nor aristocracy have ever
existed in the European sense. The land was occupied by men
whose absolute individualism involved an absence of traditional
fetters, and who, unhampered by the heirlooms of feudal Europe,
were ready and eager to realize the drive toward capitalism.
They did not cluster together in villages but scattered into an
open country. Even in the South men who held large acreages
were usually of yeoman stock, and bore the economic and politi-
cal marks of rural capitalists. After the American Revolution,
many big northern estates were confiscated and some were sold
on relatively easy terms in small lots to small farmers. Europe's
five-hundred-year struggle out of feudalism has not absorbed the
energies of the United States producer; a contractual society
began here almost de novo as a capitalist order.
Capitalism requires private owners of property who direct eco-
nomic activities for private profit. Toward this system and away
from subsistence, the American farmers traveled by way of new
transport systems on coastal waters, rivers, turnpikes, canals, and
railroads. From the beginning those on the land needed cash for
taxes, mortgage payments, and necessities they could not grow
or build. The American farmer, always an enterpriser, labored
to add to his capital plant; and, as Chevalier put it in 1835,
'everyone is speculating, and everything has become an object of
speculation . . . cotton, land, city and town lots, banks, rail-
roads.' The American farmer has always been a real-estate specu-
lator as well as a husbandman, a 'cultivator,' as Veblen said, 'of
the main chance as well as of the fertile soil,' riding the land-
THE WORLD OF THE SMALL ENTREPRENEUR 5
boom that characterized United States history up to 1920. Here,
if anywhere, the small capitalist had his rural chance.
Before the Civil War, images of business were largely those
conceived by farmers; business, in the American mind, was com-
posed of moneylenders and bankers, controlled by powerful
vested interests in eastern urban centers. Yet, as Guy Callender
has observed, 'The stock of manufacturing companies was usually
owned by the men directly interested in the enterprise, and was
rarely bought and sold. . . Such capital as existed in 1830 was
chiefly in the hand of small savers, who were naturally more in-
terested in security than in the chance of large returns. . . The
great majority of both banks and insurance companies were small
concerns with less than $100,000 capital.' Manufacturing com-
panies were even smaller.
The early businessman was a diversified economic type: mer-
chant, moneylender, speculator, shipper, 'cottage' manufacturer.
In the early nineteenth-century city, this undifferentiated mer-
chant was at the top, the laborer in port, machine shop, and
livery stable at the bottom of society; but the greatest numbers
were handicrafters and tradesmen of small but independent
means. The worker was no factory employee: he was a mechanic
or journeyman who looked forward to owning his own shop, or
a farmer to whom manufacturing was a sideline, carried on some-
times as a cottage industry. As the cities grew with industriali-
zation, their entrepreneurs and workers formed larger markets
for the farmers, and at the same time found their own expand-
ing markets in the rural areas.
The industrialization of America, especially after the Civil
War, gave rise not to a broad stratum of small businessmen, but
to the captain of industry. He was our first national image of the
middle-class man as businessman, and no one has ever sup-
planted him. In the classic image, the captain was at once a
master builder and an astute financier, but above all a success.
He was the active owner of what he had created and then man-
aged. Nothing about the operation of his going concern failed to
draw his alert attention or receive his loving care. In his role as
employer, he provided opportunity for the best of the men he
hired to learn from working under him; they might themselves
6 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
save a portion of their wages, multiply this by a small private
speculation, borrow more on their character, and start up on
their own. Even as he had done before them, his employees could
also become captains of industry.
The glory imputed to this urban hero of the old middle class
has been due to his double-barrelled success, as technologist-in-
dustrialist and as financier-businessman. In the nineteenth cen-
tury these two distinct activities were closely enough centered
in one type of man to give rise to the undivided image of the
captain of industry as both master builder and organizer of all
new beginnings.
The middle-class world was not inhabited entirely by un-
graded, small entrepreneurs. Within it there was a division be-
tween small farmers and small producers on the one hand, and
large landlords and merchants on the other. There were also those
who not only owned no property but were themselves the prop-
erty of others; yet slavery, the glaring exception to the more
generous ideals of the American Revolution, did not loom so
large as is often assumed. It was confined to one section, did not
move very far west, and was abolished in mid-century. Even in
the slave-holding states in 1850, only 30 per cent of the white
families held slaves, and three-fourths of these held less than
ten slaves; the average slave-holder was a small independent
farmer who worked on his property in land alongside his prop-
erty in men.
In the end, the development of the split between small and
large property, rather than any sharp red line between those
with property and those without it, destroyed the world of the
small entrepreneur. Yet the historical fulfilment of the big enter-
priser was hampered and delayed for long decades of the nine-
teenth century. The smaller world was sheltered by international
distance, and if what was to destroy it already lay within it, the
small entrepreneur in his heyday was not made anxious by this
emerging fact about the society he was so confidently building.
Between mercantilism and subsistence farming in the beginning,
and monopoly and high finance at the end, the society of the
small entrepreneur flourished and became the seedbed of middle-
class ideal and aspiration and myth.
THE WORLD OF THE SMALL ENTREPRENEUR 7
2. Property, Freedom & Security
The most important single fact about the society of small entre-
preneurs was that a substantial proportion of the people owned
the property with which they worked. Here the middle class was
so broad a stratum and of such economic weight that even by
the standards of the statistician the society as a whole was a
middle-class society: perhaps four-fifths of the free people who
worked owned property. In 1830 Tocqueville wrote, 'Great
wealth tends to disappear, the number of small fortunes to in-
crease.' Though he may well have exaggerated even for his own
time, the mood he reflects was that of the people about whom he
wrote.
This world did in reality contain propertyless people, but there
was so much movement in and out of the petty-bourgeois level
of farmers that it appeared that they need not remain property-
less for long. Among the generation of elite businessmen who
came to maturity during the first fifty years of the nineteenth cen-
tury almost half were of lower-class origin; before that, under
mercantilism, and afterward, under monopoly capitalism, the
proportion was scarcely one-fifth. 'One could always begin again
in America,' John Krout and Dixon Ryan Fox pointed out; Tjank-
ruptcy, which in the fixed society of Europe was the tragic end
of a career, might be merely a step in personal education.'
At the same time the rich could easily be tolerated— they were
so few. The ideal of universal small property held those without
property in collective check while it lured them on as individuals.
They would fight alongside those who already had it, joining
with them in destroying holdovers from the previous epoch which
hampered the way up for the small owner.
It seemed to the new citizens, as it has seemed to many after
them, that the road to success was purely economic. An indi-
vidual established a farm or an urban business and this individual
expanded it, rising up the scale of success as he expanded his
property. That this was so could be plainly seen: you cleared a
farm or founded a business; you cultivated or operated; you ex-
panded the business, the acreage, the profit. In the beginning of
the century necessary agricultural tools cost $15 or $20; by the
8 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
middle of the century they cost $400 or $500. Men rose along
with the expansion of their property, the property became more
valuable both because of their work and because of rising real-
estate values in the long epoch of land boom. When Lincoln,
in 1861, spoke the language of the small entrepreneur it had not
yet lost its meaning: 'The prudent, penniless beginner in the
world labors for wages a while; saves a surplus with which to
buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account an-
other while, and at length hires another beginner to help him.'
Two years later he said: 'Property is the fruit of labor. . . That
some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and
hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.'
Under the pattern of individual success there were political
and demographic conditions, notably the land policy, which
opened economic routes to the masterless individual. The wide
distribution of small property made freedom of a very literal sort
seem, for a short time, an eternal principle. The relation of one
man to another was a relation not of command and obedience
but of man-to-man bargaining. Any one man's decisions, with
reference to every other man, were decisions of freedom and of
equality; no one man dominated the calculations aflFecting a
market.
Small property meant security in so far as the market mech-
anism worked and slump and boom balanced each other into
new and greater harmonies. The wide spread of rural property
was especially important because small owners had one security
that no other kind of holding could offer— the security, even if
at low levels, of the shuttle between the market chance and sub-
sistence. When the market was bad or cash crops failed, the
farmer, if frugal and wise, could at least eat from his own
garden.
Noah Webster, in 1787, asserted that tyranny was found in the
power to oppress, freedom in the power to resist oppression; 'In
what then, does real power consist? The answer is short, plain-
in property. . . A general and tolerably equal distribution of
landed property is the whole basis of national freedom. . . An
equality of property, with the necessity of alienation constantly
operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the
very soul of a Republic. While this continues, the people will in-
THE WORLD OF THE SMALL ENTREPRENEUR 9
evitably possess both power and freedom; when this is lost, power
departs, hberty expires, and a commonwealth will inevitably
assume some other form.'
In owning land the small entrepreneur owned not merely an
'investment': he owned the sphere of his own work, and because
he owned it, he was independent. As A. Whitney Griswold has
interpreted Jefferson's doctrine, 'Who would govern himself must
own his own soul. To own his own soul he must own property,
the means of economic security.' Self-management, work, and
type of property coincided, and in this coincidence the psycho-
logical basis of original democracy was laid down. Work and
property were closely joined into a single unit. Working skills
were performed with and upon one's property; social status
rested largely upon the amount and condition of the property
that one owned; income was derived from profits made from
working with one's property. There was thus a linkage of income,
status, work, and property. And, as the power which property
gave, like the distribution of property itself, was widespread,
their coincidence was the source of personal character as well as
of social balance.
Since few men owned more property than they could work,
differences between men were due in large part to personal
strength and ingenuity. The type of man presupposed and
strengthened by this society was willingly economic, possess-
ing the 'reasonable self-interest' needed to build and operate
the market economy. He was, of course, more than an economic
man, but the techniques and the economics of production shaped
much of what he was and what he looked forward to becoming.
He was an 'absolute individual,' linked into a system with no
authoritarian center, but held together by countless, free, shrewd
transactions.
3. The Self-Balancing Society
The world of small entrepreneurs was self-balancing. Within
it no central authority allocated materials and ordered men to
specified tasks, and the course of its history was the unintended
consequence of many scattered wills each acting freely. It is no
wonder that men thought this so remarkable they called it a
10 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
piece of Divine Providence, each man's hand being guided as if
by magic into a preordained and natural harmony. The science
of economics, which sought to explain this extraordinary balance,
which provided order through liberty without authority, has not
yet entirely rid itself of the magic.
The providential society did have its economic troubles. Its
normal rhythm of slump and boom alternately frightened and
exhilarated whole sections and classes of men. Yet it was not
seized by cycles of mania and melancholia. The rhythm never
threw the economy into the lower depths known intimately to
twentieth-century men, and for long years there were no fearful
wars or threats of wars. The main lines of its history were lin-
ear, not cyclical; technical and economic processes were still ex-
panding, and the cycles that did occur seemed seasonal matters
which did not darken the whole outlook of the epoch. Through
it all there ran the exhilaration of expansion across the gigantic
continent.
In the building of his new world, the enterprising individual
had also to build a government that would guard him from cen-
tralized authority. It is often said that he 'overthrew mercantil-
ism,' and this is true in the narrower meaning of the term. He
did throw off a king and enthrone in his place the free market.
This market did not reign without support or without the exercise
of political authority, but economic authority was dominant, and
it was automatic, largely unseen, and, in fact, seldom experi-
enced as authority at all. Political authority, the traditional mode
of social integration, became a loose framework of protection
rather than a centralized engine of domination; it too was largely
unseen and for long periods very slight. The legal framework
guaranteed and encouraged the order of small property, but the
government was the guardian, not the manager, of this order.
'Let us be content with the results which have been achieved,
and which as clearly indicate others, yet more brilliant, in the
future,' wrote J. D. B. DeBow, the director of the 1850 census.
'The industry of our people needs no monitors, as to its best mode
of application under every possible circumstance— and, least of
all, monitors made out of stuff such as our politicians usually are.
As intelligence is generally diffused throughout the masses, they
THE WORLD OF THE SMALL ENTREPRENEUR 11
will perceive and admit this, and the one cry everywhere heard,
shall be, "Let us alone." '
This decentralized and unguided economic life was paralleled
by a decentralization of the military order. The state, erected by
and for the small entrepreneurs, claimed to monopolize the means
of accepted violence; yet, even in the field of military force, con-
ditions conspired to limit government and to make for a political
democracy of and for the small producer. For the means of vio-
lence, like those of production, were necessarily widely dis-
tributed; guns were locally and easily produced. Military tech-
nology did provide cannon and other artillery, but on the whole,
one gun meant one man, and the basic law proclaimed: 'The right
of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' By
technical necessity as well as by law, the possible means of co-
ercion were thus scattered among the population; the scattering
of economic power was paralleled by a scattering of military
power. Order was often violently preserved without benefit of
law: if there were cattle thieves, they were lynched; if there
were claim jumpers, they were driven off.
To this basis of decentralized violence inside the country, there
was added the fact of geographic isolation, not yet bridged by
technology. Certainly no large standing army could easily be jus-
tified on grounds of national defense. A decentralized militia,
relying on volunteers and long years of peace, a military college
to which cadets were appointed by politicians, a thoroughgoing
civilian control of military establishments and policies— these
military foundations allowed for political democracy in the soci-
ety of the self-balancing market.
Competition was the process by which men rose and fell and
by which the economy as a whole was harmonized. But for men
in the era of classic liberalism, competition was never merely an
impersonal mechanism regulating the economy of capitalism, or
only a guarantee of political freedom. Competition was a means
of producing free individuals, a testing field for heroes; in its
terms men lived the legend of the self-reliant individual. In every
area of life, liberals have imagined independent individuals freely
competing so that merit might win and character develop: in the
free contractual marriage, the Protestant church, the voluntary
12 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
association, the democratic state with its competitive party sys-
tem, as well as on the economic market. Competition was the
way hberalism would integrate its historic era; it was also a
central feature of the classic liberal's style of life.
With no feudal tradition and no bureaucratic state, the abso-
lute individualist was exceptionally placed in this liberal society
that seemed to run itself and in which men seemed to make them-
selves. Individual freedom seemed the principle of social order,
and in itself entailed security. A free man, not a man exploited,
an independent man, not a man bound by tradition, here con-
fronted a continent and, grappling with it, turned it into a million
commodities.
O
2
The Transformation of Property
Vv HAT happened to the world of the small entrepreneur is best
seen by looking at what happened to its heroes: the independent
farmers and the small businessmen. These men, the leading actors
of the middle-class economy of the nineteenth century, are no
longer at the center of the American scene; they are merely two
layers between other more powerful or more populous strata.
Above them are the men of large property, who through money
and organization wield much power over other men; alongside
and below them are the rank and file of propertyless employees
and workers, who work for wages and salaries. Many former en-
trepreneurs and their children have joined these lower ranks, but
only a few have become big entrepreneurs. Those who have per-
sisted as small entrepreneurs are not much like their nineteenth -
century prototypes, and must now operate in a world no longer
organized in their image.
The free entrepreneurs of the old middle classes have dimin-
ished as a proportion of the gainfully occupied. They no longer
enjoy the social position they once held. They no longer are
models of aspiration for the population at large. They no longer
fulfil their classic role as integrators of the social structure in
which they live and work. These are the indices of their decline.
The causes of that decline involve the whole push and shove of
modern industrial society. Its consequences ramify deep into the
world of twentieth-centiuy America.
In the midst of the small entrepreneur's epoch, John Taylor
had written: 'There are two modes of invading private property:
13
14 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
the first, by which the poor plunder the rich, is sudden and vio-
lent; the second, by which the rich plunder the poor, slow and
legal. . . Whether the law shall gradually transfer the property
of the many to the few, or insurrection shall rapidly divide the
property of the few among the many, it is equally an invasion
of private property, and equally contrary to our constitutions.'
The course of U.S. history is a series of lessons in the second of
these 'unconstitutional' modes of invading private property.
Changes in the spread and type of property have transformed
the old middle class, changed the way its members live and
what they dream about as political men, have pushed the free
and independent man away from the property centers of the
economic world. Democratic property, which the owner himself
works, has given way to class property, which others are hired
to work and manage. Rather than a condition of the owner's
work, class property is a condition of his not having to work.
The individual who owns democratic property has power over
his work; he can manage his self and his working day. The indi-
vidual who owns class property has power over those who do not
own, but who must work for him; the owner manages the work-
ing life of the non-owner. Democratic property means that man
stands isolated from economic authority; class property means
that, in order to live, man must submit to the authority which
property lends its owner.
The right of man 'to be free and rooted in work that is his
own' is denied by the transformation of property; he cannot
realize himself in his work, for work is now a set of skills sold to
another, rather than something mixed with his own property.
His work, as Eduard Heiman puts it, is 'not his own, but an item
in the business calculation of somebody else.'
The centralization of property has thus ended the union of
property and work as a basis of man's essential freedom, and the
severance of the individual from an independent means of live-
lihood has changed the basis of his life-plan and the psychologi-
cal rhythm of that planning. For the entrepreneur's economic life,
based upon property, embraced his entire lifetime and was set
within a family heritage, while the employee's economic life is
based upon the job contract and the pay period.
THE TRANSFORAAATION OF PROPERTY 15
Secure in his world, the old entrepreneur could look upon his
entire life as an economic unity, and neither his expectations nor
his achievements were necessarily hurried. In his century, he had
the chance to feel that his effort and initiative paid off, directly,
securely, and freely. Some entrepreneurs no doubt continue to ex-
perience that old feeling, but the bourgeois rank and file is today
locked in a contest against all of big capitalism's 'secondary
modes of exploitation,' and many of them fail. For the popula-
tion at large, the idea of going to work without an employer is
an unserviceable myth. For those who nevertheless try it, it is
frequently a disastrous illusion.
1. The Rural Debacle
The free man moving west did not, of course, know what his
flight meant in the American phase of world capitalism's develop-
ment. He did not understand that he was part of an economic
arrangement, dependent for its well-being upon the structure of
foreign markets and the paying off of the U.S. industrialists' debts
to other countries. 'Great agricultural surpluses,' economic his-
torians have shown, 'permitted American capitalism to grow to
maturity behind high tariff walls, for our export of foodstuffs
made possible the importation of the raw materials and capital
needed for the development of American industry.'
By high tariffs, post-Civil War industrialists shut off foreign
goods that might compete with their own products on the do-
mestic market; whatever foreign goods and services they needed
were bought by the production of surplus agricultural goods. In
the last half of the nineteenth century, imports of raw materials
for U.S. manufacture rose; imported manufactiued goods for
the consumer dropped, and the value of exported foodstuffs rose
enormously— wheat, by the millions of bushels, pork, by the mil-
lions of pounds.
The American farmer, as Louis Hacker puts it, was both the
tool and the victim of the rise of American capitalism; as a tool,
his surpluses made possible the construction of industry behind
high tariffs; as a victim, he paid higher prices for protected goods
as well as high interest and freight rates.
16 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
For the American farmer the capitaHst crisis began in the nine-
teen-twenties, during which he experienced nine years of ruin-
ously low prices; the general slump of the next decade only
worsened his condition. During the 'twenties farm prices
dropped, while those of other commodities rose, and, when all
retail prices began to fall after 1929, farm prices fell faster. In
the same period the average value of farm property dropped,
and total farm income plummeted; cash crop receipts were cut
to about one-fourth; and by 1929, the per capita income of the
farm population was about two-thirds lower than that of the
rest of the population.
This precipitous slump of agriculture coincided with long-term
changes in farm ownership; the proportion of owners dropped,
the proportion of tenants rose. Mortgage debt, as a percentage
of total farm value, more than doubled. There were more debts
and fewer owners to pay them. In the decade after 1925, almost
one-third of all farms changed hands by forced sales of one kind
or another. In 1930, only one-fourth of all farm operators, com-
pared to over one-half in 1890, owned mortgage-free farms.
With farm ownership thus forfeited by tenantry and restricted
by mortgage, most American farmers were no longer free or
independent.
Moreover, the total number of farmers, regardless of their con-
dition, had long been declining. In 1820, almost three-quarters
of the nation's labor force was engaged in agricultural produc-
tion. In the century and a quarter since then, during most of
which time frontier lands were still available, every census re-
corded the numerical decline in the proportion of farmers; by
1880, they comprised one-half; by 1949 farmers of all sorts made
up only one-eighth of the occupied populace.
The causes of such an epochal shift for an entire class lie
deep within the total system; but since the farmer has been a
creature of the free market, which tied his world together, the
market is the central fact to consider:
I. With the opening of the twentieth-century, foreign markets
contracted or disappeared; other grasslands of the world, in
newer countries wdth lower costs and higher yield, came more
and more into production. The hope of foreign outlets and high
prices faded; between 1894 and 1898 nearly one-fifth of gross
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PROPERTY 17
farm income came from foreign exports; it dropped to less than
one-tenth by the middle 'thirties. Europeans could not buy U.S.
agricultural goods in the face of increased U.S. tariffs. Europe
had no gold; America, who wanted to sell, not to buy, would
not accept her goods. And in the subsequent epoch of permanent
war economies, the nations of the world were doing their best
to become self-suflBcient.
II. The domestic market contracted. The rate of United States
population growth had reached its peak and began a slow arc
downward; there was no more big immigration; the population
began to level off. Further, the diet of this market altered in such
a way as to constrict the sales of the products of extensive agri-
culture. Even if income rose, the proportion spent for agricul-
tural stuffs did not rise proportionately; demand for food is lim-
ited physiologically as demand for industrial products is not.
ui. During the 'thirties, as monopoly features of the economy
began to be more apparent, other mechanisms began to affect
the farmer: his key economic concern has always been the ratio
between the price he gets for his product and the price he must
pay for the things he buys. During the depression of the 'thirties,
when agricultural prices dropped about 70 per cent and utility
rates did not drop at all, the farmer could afford only about one-
fourth as much electricity as before the depression. The farmer's
free market was being cut into by urban monopolists who prac-
ticed a new and more profitable kind of freedom— the freedom to
hold prices up by cutting production. Thus a price squeeze was
put on the farmer: as he entered the slump, Caroline Ware and
Gardiner Means observed, the wholesale prices of farm equip-
ment dropped only 15 per cent, while production was cut 80 per
cent; but the prices for farm produce dropped 63 per cent while
production was cut only 6 per cent. Such facts make clear the dif-
ference between the administered prices of the industrial cor-
poration and the free market prices of the farmer.
IV. In no other area of the economy have the contradictions of
U.S. capitalism been so apparent as in farming. Yet the technol-
ogy back of such contradictions has only begun to have its way
in the rural economy. In so far as the vision of classic economic
liberalism was realized in America, it worked itself out on the
family farm. But the technological revolution, which has dire con-
18 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
sequences for old middle classes everywhere, largely by-passed
the farmer; it may now be seen that, in its later period, the rural
world of the small entrepreneur existed by virtue of techno-
logical backwardness. Even between 1900 and 1939, when manu-
facturing increased its output by 267 per cent, agricultural out-
put was increased by only 60 per cent.
Yet, even so, agricultural production rose too much. For under-
lying the numerical decline of the rural populace is a constant
increase in productivity; fewer men working shorter hours can
produce more. This master trend, spurred by the First World
War, got underway in earnest during World War II. If 1910 is
assumed to equal 100, by 1945 farm employment had dropped
to 82, while production per worker had increased to 209. Behind
these figures two images loom: a thousand men each following
a mule, and a big tractor driven by a single man. These are ac-
curate images: during the generation before 1940, the number of
tractors used on farms rose from 10,000 heavy, clumsy machines
to 2,000,000 light, maneuverable, rubber-tired instruments of
production; the number of mules and horses on farms was cut
by about half.
In the second quarter of the twentieth century, for the first
time in U.S. history, farm employment began an actual decline.
World War II cut the farm population 15 per cent, drained ofi^
40 per cent of the men under 45, but raised crop and livestock
production 30 and 40 per cent. By 1950, four million farms were
able to produce one-third more than did the six million farms of
1940. Thus, one underlying cause of the farm problem is simply
that there are too many farmers. The demand for agricultural
products is relatively inflexible; the techniques of production are
constantly becoming more productive. As Griswold has indicated,
the result has been 'the underemployment of agricultural labor
shown up so vividly by the war, the price-depressing surpluses,
the low income, and the correspondingly inferior cultural oppor-
tunities.'
Farming has thus moved in a fuU circle: what was once as-
sumed to be a frontier outlet is now, in the dry words of a De-
partment of Agriculture expert, 'a definite lack of employment
opportunities in agricultural production.' Yet the consequences
of the technological revolution for the American farmer go be-
THE TRANSFORAAATION OF PROPERTY 19
yond the fact of numerical decline. This revolution emphasizes
the fact that an 'overproduction crisis' like that of the 'thirties
hangs as a constant threat over the farmers and over any plan
that may be made for them.
Within the rural populace, the market mechanics and the tech-
nological motors of social change have been cutting down the
proportion of free entrepreneurs. For at least fifty years the
American ideal of the family-sized farm has been becoming
more and more an ideal and less and less a reality. In 1945 full
owners of farms made up only 6 per cent of the nation's civilian
labor force.
The rural middle class has been slowly subjected to a polari-
zation, which, if continued, will destroy the traditional character
of farming, splitting it into subsistence cultivators, wage-workers,
and sharecroppers on the one hand, and big commercial farmers
and rural corporations on the other. By 1945, 2 per cent of all
farms contained 40 per cent of all farm land.
Back of this drift to larger scale and increasing concentration
is the machine, which has made farming a highly capitalized
business. A tractor-operated farm requires from 30 to 50 per cent
more capital than a horse-operated unit. According to a repu-
table business journal, a 'typical Iowa farmer' in 1946 would
have around 160 acres, which might cost anywhere from $100 to
$300 an acre— at a minimum, '$16,000 for land.' In addition, 'such
a farmer would need about $33,000 of original investment in
capital assets,' $30,000 for buildings and equipment, and $3000
in working capital.
The low rate at which farm machinery is normally used accel-
erates this trend. A manufacturer can expect a big lathe to be
used two thousand hours a year; a farmer can expect only fifty
hours from his hay baler. To make the baler pay the farmer buys
more land on which to use it: average farm size has jumped from
138 acres in 1910 to 195 in 1945. If the ordinary small farmer
mechanizes without expanding his holding, the overhead for
repair and depreciation will get out of bounds. Either he must
sell out, or try to hire out his machines to his neighbors.
The largest proportion of all agricultural commodities has
always been produced by a comparatively few large farms; but
20 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
over the last two or three decades this concentration has in-
creased sharply. Farm prices rose greatly during World War II,
but less than a tenth of the farmers received one-half of the total
farm income. In such periods of farm prosperity the farmer
as real-estate speculator increases the centralization; many mar-
ginal producers are thus eliminated, as farm land becomes even
more concentrated, farmers fewer and richer.
Whether or not a tenant farmer or a rural wage-worker has an
easy chance to climb the agricultural ladder from rural wage-
worker to tenant to mortgaged owner to full owner is a question
taken seriously only in popular fantasy. Just what the chance to
climb may be and what the trend has been are difficult to show.
But this much is certain: in the forty years after 1890, the abso-
lute number of young farmers declined, and, among young men
still on the farm, about 50 per cent more started as tenants than
as owners. Many of them continued as tenants; many left for the
city because they could not start as owners or did not see the
chances to rise to full ownership. To many of these, the ladder
has indeed seemed a treadmill: they have expressed their appre-
ciation of rural life and of its chances by joining the rural exodus.
Farming is not yet rationalized, but the rural world of the
small entrepreneur is already gone. The industrial revolution,
only now getting under way on the farm, already has determined,
in Griswold's words, that 'a self-sufiBcient farm in our time is more
likely to be a haunt of illiteracy and malnutrition than a well-
spring of democracy.' The industrial revolution tends to draw the
family farm into its orbit, or leave it stranded in an archaic sub-
sistence economy.
2. Business Dynamics
Nevertheless, as a broad American stratum, the small entre-
preneurs are still mainly people on farms. Men entering the city
seldom have acquired business properties and become free pro-
ducers and traders; on the contrary, as members or potential
members of the old middle class, they have been destroyed. The
small urban entrepreneur has never formed a broad stratum
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PROPERTY 21
which, like the rural, could enact a key role in the shaping of a
free society. The city never matched the countryside: neat rows
of independent shops never grew up to become the equivalents
of sections of land. Industrial plants and retail stores were not
given to smaller men as were farms, and the capital required to
start new businesses became greater in rough proportion to tech-
nological progress. There was never any Homestead Act for the
would-be urban entrepreneur, although for manufacturers the
tariff was something of a Homestead Act. Industrialization does
not necessarily develop a private centralization of enterprises,
with resultant diflBculties for small entrepreneurs, but that is the
way it has worked out in America.
Even before the Civil War, as the new transportation network
began to knit localities into a national market, local artisans
began to work for merchant capitalists. The need for raw mate-
rials and capital and for outlets to the national market soon
caused the independent producer to become dependent upon
bigger men. The businessman of the city, who was tied to the
technologist, considered it his role to organize technology and
labor and become their profitable link with the protected mar-
ket. And as the nation grew up, so did its heroes: not big farm-
ers, but big businessmen, though often called by other names,
rose to national eminence. By the 'nineties, William Dean How-
ells' Man Who Had Risen was supplementing Walt Whitman's
Man in the Open Air.
In the twentieth century, technology continued rapidly to ex-
pand; but expansion of the market took place much more slowly.
In the attempt to stabilize matters, the captains of industry began
to draw together, and out of their epic competition there emerged
impersonal monopoly. The freedom to compete— the main prin-
ciple of order in the world of the small entrepreneur— became
the freedom to shape the new society. As the concentration of
private enterprise began to change the type of businessman that
prevailed, the Captain of Industry gave way to the Rentier, the
Absentee Owner, the Corporation Executive, and a type presently
to be described, the New Entrepreneur.
Neither the Rentier nor the Absentee Owner, however, is, in
the public mind, a productively competitive man. Each is a
22 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
coupon clipper and a parasite, either a stealthy miser or a lavish
consumer; theirs is not the business life of competition, and even
liberal economists deplore their economic role. The Corporation
Executive has never been a popular middle-class idol; as part of
an impersonal corporation, he is too aloof to have a friendly repu-
tation among smaller men. As an engineer he is part of inexor-
able science, and no economic hero; as a businessman he is part
of the hidden world of finance, where all the big money mysteri-
ously ends up.
None of these newer types of economic men has quite filled
the heroic place of the old, undivided captain, who has gradually
taken on a somewhat bloated, predatory, and overbearing shape.
The more he became a big financier and the less an inventive
organizer of the small factory— which everyone could see was
producing things— the more sinister this predatory image became.
The big businessman was generalized into the Financial Magnate,
who, living in the lawful shade of society, uses other people's
money for his own profit. Yet, as it has been often difficult to
distinguish a dirt farmer from a real-estate operator, so has it
been hard to distinguish a genuine captain of industry, even in
the captain's heyday, from a generalissimo of high finance. Per-
haps the urban American businessman has always been some-
thing of both.
If the old middle classes were to find a hero in the city, he
would have to be from the small-business strata. And so the small
businessman, especially with the general decline of the farmer,
has come to be seen as the somewhat woebegone heir of the old
captain's tradition, even if only by default. The harder his strug-
gle becomes, the more sympathetic and heroic his image is
drawn; and yet he can never live up to the heritage invented
for him. More and more, it has become in his eyes a permanent
burden rather than a glory to lean on in times of temporary
trouble. As image he remains a prop to the captain-become-
monopolist; as reality he persists more as a political than as a
business force.
During the last several decades, the proportion of businessmen
has stood at about 8 per cent of the nation's working force, and
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PROPERTY 23
in the urban world has decHned from 17 per cent in 1870
to 12 per cent in 1940. Their remarkable persistence as a stratum,
however, should not be confused with the well-being of each
individual enterprise and its owner-manager. While, as an aggre-
gate, small businessmen persist and hold their own, the compo-
sition of this aggregate changes rapidly, and the economic well-
being of its members undergoes shocking ups and dovsms.
In the four decades prior to World War II, the number of
firms in existence rose from 1 to 2 million, but during the same
period nearly 16 million firms began operation, and at least 14
million went out of business. There is a great flow of entrepre-
neurs and would-be entrepreneurs in and out of the small-busi-
ness stratum, as each year hundreds of thousands fail and others,
some new to the game, some previous failures, start out again on
the brave venture.
The great bulk of businesses are small outfits, which do not
last long. In fact, the turnover rate of one-man enterprises in
1940 was almost as high as the average annual separation rate
for factory workers during the prewar decade. Tt is apparent,*
as J. H. Cover the economist says, after examining the vital sta-
tistics of small business, 'that optimism exceeds understanding
in the cases of possibly two-thirds of our new proprietors.'
It is an infant death rate in two senses: both the small and
the new concerns typically fail. These two senses are related:
in those industries where the capital involved in starting a new
business is prohibitive to small entrepreneurs there often is sta-
bility; and in those industries where capital requirements do not
stand in the way, the problems of survival are naturally greater.
It might be supposed that all these failures and new begin-
nings are only the unfit being eliminated by the fit in a normal
competitive process. But such a view overlooks the fact that the
continuation of bankruptcies and failures would seem to indicate
that the unfit are often replaced by the unfit; and that, since the
trend of bankruptcies is often upward, it might even be that the
number of unfit often increases.
Back of the failures is the general fact that a larger number
of small businesses are competing for a small share of the market.
The stratum of urban entrepreneurs has been Harrowing, and
24 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
within it a concentration has been going on. Small business be-
comes smaller, big business becomes bigger.
The business world is less homogeneous now than seventy
years ago: businessmen now work in a bewildering variety of
types and sizes of enterprises, from the sidestreet laundry to the
General Motors Corporation. At the bottom are a multitude of
small firms, worth little financially, which do not produce or sell
much of the nation's total goods and services, and do not employ
many of the people at work. In 1939 the 1,500,000 one-man enter-
prises made up almost half of all non-farming businesses, but
engaged only 6 per cent of all people at work in business. At the
top are a handful of firms which employ the bulk of the people
at work, produce or sell most of the goods and services handled,
and hold most of the capital goods appropriated to private use.
In 1939, 1 per cent of all the firms in the country— 27,000 giants-
engaged over half of all the people working in business. For
about thirty years, now, three-fourths of U.S. corporations have
got only about 5 per cent of the total corporate income.
No matter which year is studied, or what criteria are used, the
fact of extreme business concentration is clear. Over-all measure-
ments, however, conceal the crucial fact that concentration varies
a great deal by line of business. Roughly speaking, the business
world is polarized into two types: large industrial corporations
and small retail or service firms.
In the generation before World War II, the number of pro-
prietors of manufacturing establishments declined 34 per cent;
the number of wage and salary workers employed in manufac-
turing rose 27 per cent. Manufacturing is no longer a small busi-
ness world; it is increasingly dominated by large-scale bureau-
cratic structures. The war economy, built on top of this already
extreme concentration, further concentrated American industry.
Retail trade, bottom of the business world in terms of persons
engaged and value of business transacted, is still largely domi-
nated by small business. The sales of the smallest three-quarters
of retail stores represented 22 per cent of the total 1939 retail
sales, nearly twice that of the smallest three-quarters of the manu-
facturing firms. As far as making up any dominant section of the
total business world, the small businessman can now be seen to
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PROPERTY 25
exist only in the retail and service industries, and to a lesser ex-
tent in finance and construction.
In the early nineteenth century the wholesaler was the big go-
between of the business world: he was able to control the small
manufacturer as well as the small retailer, for both, especially the
retailer, were often dependent upon him for credit. But the manu-
facturer expanded and became independent of the wholesaler,
often taking over many of his functions. In time, the retailer also
moved in on the wholesaler's business. Then the manufacturer
tried to eliminate both wholesaler and retailer by selling directly
to the consumer.
As the volume of production rose in the later nineteenth cen-
tury, the economic system was confronted with capitalism's pe-
culiar and crucial problem: there is no profit to be made from
huge volume unless a huge market exists. As technology pushed
the manufacturer into higher productivity, he was confronted
with an extremely inefficient and wasteful system of marketing.
The smaller units in wholesaling and retailing— the bulk of the
old urban middle class— had become a brake upon the technologi-
cal wheels of capitalist progress, or so the big manufacturer
thought.
At the same time, the retailer was also growing up. The de-
partment store is a stable member of the marketing community:
the proportion of retail sales handled by department stores has
not fluctuated very widely over the last fifteen years. The mail-
order house now combines many of the features of the depart-
ment store and the chain and, acting at a distance, reaches into
the back eddies of the market. As this system of mass distributors
began slowly to emerge, its units did their own wholesaling, from
the mass producer to the consumer. As supermarkets mush-
roomed, outdoing the chain stores in the technique of mass dis-
tribution, the chains began to imitate their supermarket com-
petitors, and the two giants of the retail trade battled with one
another, competing far more than little businessmen ever could.
As wholesalers were displaced by retailers, the latter, from
the central position of those close to the business at hand, began
to bring pressure on the manufacturers, saying: 'Split up with
us. Your low costs are due to your mass production, but what
26 OLD MIDDLE CUSSES
good would your mass production be without our mass distribu-
tion? Cut us in/ The manufacturer, having partly thrown oflF
wholesaler control, being confronted now by another contender
for his profits, replied with national advertising of his brand
name and with retail outlets of his own. With these tools he has
been trying to dominate both retailer and wholesaler.
Sears, Roebuck vice-president T. V. Houser sums up the pres-
ent trend: on the one hand, there is 'the dominant large manu-
facturers with their own branded lines, distributing their prod-
ucts through thousands of independent dealers; on the other
hand, the mass distributor with his many and various branded
lines, buying each of these lines from smaller manufacturers . . .
in one case, the manufacturer determines the . . . design, qual-
ity, price and production schedules [of the product]; while in
the other case these functions are assumed by the mass dis-
tributor. . .' From both sides, the wholesaler takes the brunt of
the competitive battle of the marketeers, and loses ground to
both.
Not all domination by big business, however, results in out-
right mergers or bankruptcies or is revealed by the facts of con-
centration. The power of the larger businesses is such that, even
though many small businesses remain independent, they become
in reality agents of larger businesses. The important point is that
the small businessman has been deprived of his old entrepre-
neurial function.
When banks demand managerial reforms before extending
credit, they are centralizing the initiative and responsibility sup-
posedly entailed in the entrepreneurial flair. Many small business-
men are now financed by supply houses, and large producers and
suppliers not only set the prices which small businesses in the
industry then follow, but often extend credit to small businesses;
there are cases in which, if the big concern extending credit were
to call it in, many small men would be ruined. Such dependency
on trade credit tends to reduce the small businessman to an
agent of the creditor.
The independence of small businessmen is also curtailed by
'exclusive dealing contracts' and 'full line forcing' by means of
which manufacturers, who set retail prices and advertise na-
tionally, turn small retailers into what amounts to salesmen on
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PROPERTY 27
commission who take entrepreneurial risks. In manufacturing,
subcontracting often turns the small subcontractor into what
amounts to a risk-taking manager of a branch plant.
It might be thought that the small wholesaler, retailer, and
manufacturer, each variously affected by the domination of large
business, would get together against their common foe, but they
have not done so on any scale. Instead, the small retailer, the
largest element in small business, has sought refuge from compe-
tition in the national brands of big manufacturers and advertisers,
and has demanded and got such stratagems as 'fair trade'
legislation, under which all retailers of a product must sell at a
uniform price. Legislation of this sort means that such competi-
tion as exists goes on among various manufacturers, in whose
field monopoly is great, rather than among retailers, among whom
monopoly is less well developed. Moreover, because the small
manufacturer is largely cut off from the small retailer, he too
comes under the domination of the big-scale operator, in this
case the big retailer— the chain or department store, who as large-
scale buyers can often dominate the price of the articles they
buy.
Many smaller elements of the old middle class have slowly
been ground to pieces. As the contest has shifted from production
to salesmanship, many smaller manufacturers have continued to
exist by becoming direct satellites of larger manufacturing con-
cerns, and many retailers have become, in fact, maintenance
agencies and distributors for big manufacturers. Thus, the small
manufacturer and the small retailer, far from forming an alli-
ance, are locked in struggle over the market, in the course of
which both come under the domination of larger business.
Distribution is the home of small business, and distribution is
one of the most wasteful features of the U.S. economy. In food
retailing, for example, chains have definitely decreased the gen-
erous spread between farmer and consumer prices, A retail store
cannot be run efficiently or cheaply unless there is an adequate
turnover per store. Chains have this volume, and the additional
advantage of being able to bring in salaried experts for every
28 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
department of the business. They are more efficient and cheaper.
In them the entrepreneurial flair is replaced by a standardized
procedure. Buying, display, advertising, merchandising, atten-
tion to costs are each centralized and managed by salaried ex-
perts in chain, department store, and supermarket. 'We must,'
says distribution authority A. C. Hoffman, 'either accept the in-
eptitude of the average person in order to preserve for him
some measure of what is called economic individualism, or we
must accept the change from enterpriser to employee status in
order to achieve the advantages of centralized management.'
As the processor's influence and the engineer's ideas are tak-
ing over the functions of independent farmers, so the big manu-
facturer and the engineer of distribution are eyeing the market-
ing system, the home of the small businessmen. The old middle
classes, on the farm and in the city, are clogging the wheels of
progress as envisioned by the technologists and efficiency experts.
3. The Lumpen-Bourgeoisie
Examining the statistics that indicate the sad condition, the
heavy rate of failure, and yet the curious survival of tiny busi-
nesses and farms, one is reminded of Balzac's unkind remark
made in another connection: 'insignificant folk cannot be crushed,
they lie too flat beneath the foot.' If we may speak of a 'lumpen-
proletariat,' set off from other wage workers, we may also speak
of a 'lumpen-bourgeoisie,' set off from other middle-class ele-
ments. For the bottom of the entrepreneurial world is so dif-
ferent from the top that it is doubtful whether the two should be
classified together.
In the city the lumpen-bourgeoisie is composed of a multitude
of firms with a high death rate, which do a fraction of the total
business done in their lines and engage a considerably larger
proportion of people than their quota of business. Thus, ten years
ago over half of the retail stores did only 9 per cent of the busi-
ness but engaged 21 per cent of all the people in retail trade.
The true lumpen-bourgeoisie, however, employ no workers at
all: the proprietors and their family members do the work, fre-
quently sweating themselves night and day. At the bottom of the
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PROPERTY 29
depression, the 'proprietor's withdrawal' was Hberally estimated
at $9.00 a week for stores with sales under $10,000. Here, at the
bottom of the twentieth-century business world, lies the owner-
operator who, in the classic image, is the independent man in
the city.
But it is on the farm with its dwarfish means of production
that the small entrepreneur has persisted as a large proportion
of the marginal victims of the old middle class. Twenty years
ago, at the 1929 peak of business prosperity, nearly half of the
nation's farms produced less than $1000 worth of products, in-
cluding those used by the family, but this least productive half
contributed only 11 per cent of all the products sold or traded by
farmers. By the middle 'forties, at the peak of the farm boom,
the relative figures had not changed much: 40 per cent of all
farms received less than $1000 a year; one-fourth yielded $600
or less. The rural malnutrition rate has been twice as high as the
urban, and it is on the farm that we find the national highest
birth and infant mortality rates. A full third of the farmers live
in rural slums, in houses virtually beyond repair; two-thirds are
'inadequately housed.' In 1945, only three out of ten U.S. farm-
ers had mechanical refrigerators, only four had kitchen sinks with
drains. The small farmer and his family are caught up in an inef-
ficient drudgery, and many are 'independent' only part of the
time, hiring themselves to large farmers the rest, and all the time
hovering above tenantry only by barbaric overwork and under-
consumption.
Engineers point out that 'one-fifth of our original area of till-
able land' has been ruined for further cultivation; 'a third of what
remains has already been badly damaged. Another third is highly
vulnerable.' Among the reasons for this, H. H. Bennett, chief of
a service in the Department of Agriculture, pointed out in 1946,
is the fact that 'too much of the land traditionally has been in
the hands of the untutored and the inept. . . Under the names
of peasant, farmer, rustic, and country fellow, these individuals
have been synonymous, for generations, with all that is naive,
uneducated, and backward. Possessed frequently of such virtues
as thrift and diligence, they have nevertheless often assumed a
scornful attitude toward education and the educated. And too
30 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
often, the farm has been the last resort to which men unsuccess-
ful in other fields have turned.'
The midget entrepreneur, on the farm and in the city, is eco-
nomically sensitive to the business cycle; his insecurities are
tightly geared to it. Slight shifts in the direction or volume of
business can be reflected sharply in his rate of profit. From
month to month, he may exist in acute anxiety; even slight eco-
nomic forces, outside his control, may swing him ofl: balance and
lower his level of psychic security. Once no individual could
direct the market, but now the small man feels, often correctly,
that it is fixed against him.
As owner, manager, and worker, the marginal victim typically
uses liis family to help out in store, farm, or shop. Economic life
thus coincides with family life. In the hole-in-the-wall business,
also known as a Mom-and-Pop store, the parents can keep a con-
stant eye on each other and on the children. Such economic free-
dom as the family enterprise may enjoy is often purchased by
lack of freedom within the family unit. It is, in fact, as Wilhelm
Reich has noted, a feature of such petty-bourgeois life that ex-
treme repression is often exercised in its patriarchal orbit. Child
labor, often sweated child labor, has its home in the lumpen-
bourgeoisie. Of all industrial categories it is the farm and the
retail store that contain the highest proportion of free enter-
prisers—and the highest proportion of 'unpaid family workers.'
Business competition and economic anxiety thus come out in
family relations and in the iron discipline required to keep afloat.
Since there is little or no outlet for feelings beyond the confines
of the shop or farm, members of these families may grow greedy
for gain. The whole force of their nature is brought to bear upon
trivial affairs which absorb their attention and shape their char-
acter. They come to exercise, as Balzac has said, 'the power of
pettiness, the penetrating force of the grub that brings down
the elm tree by tracing a ring under the bark.'
The family circle is closed in and often withdrawn into itself,
thus encouraging strong intimacies and close-up hatreds. The
children of such families are often the objects upon which paren-
tal frustrations are projected. They are subjected alternately to
overindulgence, which springs from close parental competition
THE TRANSFORAAATION OF PROPERTY 31
for their affection, and to strong discipline, which is based on the
parents' urge to 'make the child amount to something.' In the
meantime continual deprivations are justified in terms of the
future success of the children, who must give up things now, but
who, by doing so, may legitimately claim the rewards of great
deference and gratification in the future. There is evidence that
the coming to adolescence of the lumpen-bourgeois child is a
painful juncture fraught with many perils for parent and child,
and perhaps also for society.
Behind the colorless census category 'unpaid family worker,'
there lie much misery and defeat in youth. That too was and is
part of the old middle-class way. Perhaps in the nineteenth-cen-
tury it paid off: the sons, or at least one of the sons, would take
over his equipped station, and the daughter might better find a
husband who would thus be set up. But the average life of these
old middle-class, especially urban, units in the twentieth century
is short; the coincidence of family-unit and work-situation among
the old middle class is a pre-industrial fact. So even as the cen-
tralization of property contracts their 'independence,' it liberates
the children of the old middle class's smaller entrepreneurs.
The diflBculties of making a stable life-plan further augment the
competitive anxieties and family tensions of the lumpen-bour-
geoisie. On the one hand, the small man generally lives longer
than the small business, so in many cases the business cannot
provide income for a lifetime. On the other hand, the elderly
proprietor of a small business frequently has difficulty replacing
himself. He builds up a struggling enterprise over the years by
hard work and fear, and then he wants to retire; but who could
replace him? He has built up a little business and his impending
retirement or death damages the credit standing of the enter-
prise with which he has been so personally identified.
The economic situation of the lumpen-bourgeoisie leads to
insecurity, and often to petty aggressiveness. Their prestige is
often considered by them to be low, in relation to those on whom
their eyes are fixed— the larger, more successful entrepreneurs.
And, over the last twenty years, they have felt a denial of defer-
ence in relation to workers organized in successful unions.
To these economic and social bases of insecurity and frustra-
tion may be added a more personal source, aptly noted by Har-
32 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
old D. Lasswell: running a business often involves a calculating
posture toward other people which may cause a certain amount
of guilt. The marginal victim is often economically compelled to
calculate, plan, and evaluate his own actions and impulses, as
well as those of his wife and children who help him in the busi-
ness; he must do so in the cold light of his economic goal and
often via sharp economic practices. So, the intensification of
work, the deferral of consumption for his family and himself, is
justified by the high premium on thrift and respectability.
During business hours at least, he must allow the customer
always to be right. Subservient to any one above him, to
whose level he may aspire and from whom he may suffer petty
rebuffs, the lumpen-bourgeois often turns harshly against wage-
workers in the abstract, although in so far as they are among his
customers he may have to suppress such targets of aggression.
The capitalist spirit, Werner Sombart has written, combines a
spirit of adventure, a desire for gain, and the middle-class virtues
of the respectable citizen. Among those smaller bourgeois, the
desire for gain now seems uppermost; it becomes the focus of
virtue, and as the adventurous spirit is replaced by a search for
the sure fix, the very norms of respectability become psychologi-
cal traps and sources of guilt. The calculation for gain spreads
into the whole social life, as the lumpen-bourgeois man thinks of
his social universe, including the members of his family, as fac-
tors in his struggle, a struggle in which he is often as unsuccessful
as he is ambitious.
The old bourgeois, the man of measure for whom wealth was
not necessarily an end in itself but rather a means of continuing
his unruffled way of life, the man who did not frenziedly reach
out for customers but patiendy expected, like a territorial prince,
a fenced-off reserve of his share— that man is gone. Inner ease
and wide range no longer derive from the business life of the
old middle class on any level, and certainly not on its lumpen
stratum; from the lumpen-bourgeoisie a sordid style and narrow
ideas are more likely to come. No longer can the smallest entre-
preneurs be characterized as among that middle class of which
W. E. H. Lecky wrote, in 1896, that it was 'distinguished beyond
all others for its political independence, its caution, its solid prac-
tical intelligence, its steady industry, its high moral average,' or
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PROPERTY 33
which Georges Sorel characterized as a class of serious moral
habits, filled with its own dignity, having the energy and will to
govern a country without a centralized bureaucracy. No longer is
there the effective will to power of the old middle class, but rather
the tenacious will to fight off encircling competitive menaces.
From this series of small-scale wretchedness, a fretful assertive-
ness is fed, human relations are poisoned, and a personality is
formed with which it is not pleasant to exchange political greet-
ings. The small entrepreneur is scared; so he embraces ideologies
and struggles for prestige in ways not entirely befitting standard
images of the free businessman and the independent farmer.
Yet despite their victimized elements and high turnover, the
entrepreneurial strata as a whole persist, and, in certain phases
of the economic cycle, some members do well enough. Most,
however, no longer fulfil the entrepreneurial function; they are
no longer independent operators. The character of their decline
in this respect has primarily to do with the changed nature of
competition in the twentieth-century economic order. Their eco-
nomic anxieties have led many small entrepreneurs to a some-
what indignant search for some political means of security, and
there have been many spokesmen to take up the search for them.
3
The Rhetoric of Competition
As an economic fact, the old independent entrepreneur lives on
a small island in a big new world; yet, as an ideological figment
and a political force he has persisted as if he inhabited an entire
continent. He has become the man through whom the ideology
of Utopian capitalism is still attractively presented to many of
our contemporaries. Over the last hundred years, the United
States has been transformed from a nation of small capitalists
into a nation of hired employees; but the ideology suitable for
the nation of small capitalists persists, as if that small-propertied
world were still a going concern. It has become the grab-bag of
defenders and apologists, and so little is it challenged that in the
minds of many it seems the very latest model of reality.
Nostalgia for the rural world of the small entrepreneur now so
effectively hides the mechanics of industry that the farmer, the
custodian of national life, is able to pursue his cash interests to
the point of defying the head of the government in time of war.
And while the small urban entrepreneur, as an examplar of the
competitive way, suffers exhaustion, the oflBcials of American
opinion find more and more reason to proclaim his virtues. *We
realize . . .' Senator James Murray has said, 'that small business
constitutes the very essence of free enterprise and that its preser-
vation is fundamental to the American idea.' The logic of the
small entrepreneurs is not the logic of our time; yet if the old
middle classes have been transformed into often scared and
always baflBed defenders, they have not died easily; they persist
34
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 35
energetically, even if their energies sometimes seem to be those
of cornered men.
Not the urgencies of democracy's problems, but the peculiar
structure of American political representation; not the efficiency
of small-scale enterprise, but the usefulness of its image to the
political interests of larger business; not the swift rise of the huge
city, but the myopia induced by small-town life of fifty years
ago— these have kept alive the senator's fetish of the American
entrepreneur.
1. The Competitive Way of Life
Official proclamations of the competitive ways of small entre-
preneurs now labor under an enormous burden of fact which
demonstrates in detail the accuracy of Thorstein Veblen's analysis.
Competition, he held, is by no means dead, but it is chiefly 'com-
petition between the business concerns that control production,
on the one side, and the consuming public on the other side; the
chief expedients in this businesslike competition being salesman-
ship and sabotage.' Competition has been curtailed by larger
corporations; it has also been sabotaged by groups of smaller
entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear
the locus of the big competition and have revealed the mask-like
character of liberalism's rhetoric of small business and family
farm.
The character and ideology of the small entrepreneurs and the
facts of the market are selling the idea of competition short.
These liberal heroes, the small businessmen and the farmers, do
not want to develop their characters by free and open competi-
tion; they do not believe in competition, and they have been do-
ing their best to get away from it.
When small businessmen are asked whether they think free
competition is, by and large, a good thing, they answer, with
authority and vehemence, 'Yes, of course— what do you mean?'
If they are then asked, 'Here in this, your town?' still they say,
'Yes,' but now they hesitate a little. Finally: 'How about here in
this town in furniture?'— or groceries, whatever the man's line is.
Their answers are of two sorts: 'Yes, if it's fair competition,'
which turns out to mean: 'if it doesn't make me compete.' Their
36 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
second answer adds up to the same competition with the public:
'Well, you see, in certain lines, it's no good if there are too many
businesses. You ought to keep the other fellow's business in mind.'
The small businessman, as well as the farmer, wants to become
big, not directly by eating up others like himself in competition,
but by the indirect ways and means practiced by his own par-
ticular heroes— those already big. In the dream life of the small
entrepreneur, the sure fix is replacing the open market.
But if small men wish to close their ranks, why do they con-
tinue to talk, in abstract contexts, especially political ones, about
free competition? The answer is that the political function of
free competition is what really matters now, to small entre-
preneurs, but especially to big-business spokesmen. This ideology
performs a crucial role in the competition between business on
the one hand and the electorate, labor in particular, on the other.
It is a means of justifying the social and economic position of
business in the community at large. For, if there is free competi-
tion and a constant coming and going of enterprises, the one who
remains established is 'the better man' and 'deserves to be where
he is.' But if instead of such competition, there is a rigid line be-
tween successful entrepreneurs and the employee community,
the man on top may be 'coasting on what his father did,' and not
really be worthy of his hard-won position. Nobody talks more
of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning
than the man who inherited his father's store or farm. Thus the
principle of the self-made man, and the justification of his su-
perior position by the competitive fire through which he has
come, require and in turn support the ideology of free competi-
tion. In the abstract poUtical ranges, everyone can believe in
competition; in the concrete economic case, few small entrepre-
neurs can aflFord to do so.
Before the automobile was in wide use, the spread of the farm-
ing community over vast distances enabled the merchant of the
smaller town to effect a virtual monopoly over the small-town
population and the surrounding farming areas. The competition
between businessman and farmer was thus arranged by geog-
raphy and settlement in favor of the small-town businessman.
'The nearest thing we have ever had to monopoly in grocery
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 37
retailing,' remarks one T.N.E.C.* economist, *. . . was the old
village grocery store. The prices which it charged were not elastic
and usually not very competitive until the automobile made
them so.'
It is ironic that this 'natural' monopoly of the small-town entre-
preneur was broken, in large part, by precisely those agencies of
mass distribution which small businessmen now denounce as 'un-
fair competitors.' The same forces that enlarged the market area
and destroyed the old local monopoly— railroad and mail-order
house, chain store, automobile, and supermarket— now appear as
the very octopuses of monopoly. They might indeed become just
that, but at the present time they are often the only active com-
petitors in the retail field. In the end the choice is between types
of monopolists.
It was during the 'thirties that the small entrepreneurs' opinion
of competition became clear on a nation-wide scale. When the
Depression hit, the independent businessmen, like the farmers,
made their revealing shift in strategy: in an attempt to install a
kept individualism, they moved the fight from the economic into
the political field.
For the small entrepreneurs no ideological crash accompanied
the economic crash; they went marching on ideologically. But
they did not remain isolated economic men without any political
front; they tried to tie themselves up in elaborate organizational
networks. In Congress small-business committees clamored for
legislation to save the weak backbone of the national economy.
Their legislative efi^orts have been directed against their more
eflBcient competitors. First they tried to kill off the low-priced
chain stores by taxation; then they tried to eliminate the alleged
buying advantages of mass distributors; finally they tried to
freeze the profits of all distributors in order to protect their owoi
profits from those who could and were selling goods cheaper to
the consumer.
The independent retailer has been at the head of the move-
ment for these adjuncts of free enterprise: in his fear of price
competition and his desire for security, he has been pushing to
• Temporary National Economic Commission.
38 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
maintain a given margin under the guise of 'fair competition' and
'fair-trade' laws. He now regularly demands that the number of
outlets controlled by chain stores be drastically limited and that
production be divorced from distribution. This would, of course,
kill the low prices charged consumers by the A&P, which makes
very small retail profits, selling almost at cost, and whose real
profits come from manufacturing and packaging.
The retailers in the small town need not foolishly compete with
one another in terms of prices; they may as well co-operate with
one another and thus compete more effectively with their mutual
customers. In a well-organized little city, with a capable Cham-
ber of Commerce, there is no reason why merchants should cut
one another's throat, especially in view of chain stores and mail-
order houses, good highways, and fast automobiles connecting
smaller towns with larger cities. Why should the entrepreneur
demand anything less than complete security in the risks he
takes? Why shouldn't he exercise foresight by making sure he is
'in' on a deal before it becomes publicly known?
The competitive spirit, especially when embodied in an ethic
which is conceived to be the source of all virtue, abounds only
where there is consciousness of unlimited opportunity. When-
ever there is consciousness of scarcity, of a limited, contracting
world, then competition becomes a sin against one's fellows.
The group tries to close its ranks, as in labor unions, to set
up rules for insiders and rules against those who are closed
out. This is what the small entrepreneur is in the process of doing.
No longer filled with a consciousness of abundance, if he ever
was, he now lives in a world of limited or scarce opportunities,
and other people are seen as a competitive menace or as men to
join up with.
Under the threat of 'ruinous competition,' laws are on the
books of many states and cities legalizing the ruin of competition.
Price-maintained items do sell for higher prices after the passage
of such laws; and prices are higher for cities where the main-
tenance is legal than in cities where it is not. Such laws extend
into small-enterprise fields the administered price that the large
manufacturing corporations are able to fix among themselves.
The small entrepreneur is thus only trying to have his govern-
ment help him achieve what big business and big farmers have
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 39
achieved before him. And the business world, a closed-in com-
munity of men with a consciousness of scarcity, is thus more co-
operatively solidified.
The wholesaler, given his frequent dependence upon the good
will of the independent merchant, strings along on resale price
maintenance. He too would avoid 'competitive price cutting' in
order to assure his profit margin. The manufacturer of trade-
marked goods also likes it; like other people in the world of
business, he has no love of low prices. Once 'destructive compe-
tition' begins, it will spread between manufacturers and distribu-
tors who will want higher margins and lower prices from manu-
facturers; also, the manufacturer needs the good will of the re-
tailers so they will push his lines or brands, and finally the manu-
facturer spends money on advertising; and price cutting (com-
petition) of any kind substitutes lower prices for the higher costs
of advertising. National advertising and resale price maintenance
thus supplement each other, and together further the competition
between business and the consumer.
Today many small entrepreneurs are in no way competitive
units steering independent courses in an open market; they are
not centers of initiative or places of economic innovation; they
operate within market channels and a tangled pile-up of restric-
tive legislation and trade practices firmly laid out by big business
and firmly upheld by small business. The small entrepreneur
tenders his ideological gifts to big business in return for a feudal-
like protection. In the meantime, the fight between the two over
the domain of the market goes on, although it increasingly be-
comes a fight between political spokesmen, who desire to exploit
anxieties under the banner of free competition, and larger capi-
talists, who desire to rationalize the economics of distribution
under the same banner.
In continuing to see competition as salvation from complicated
trouble, the senators naturally fall into the small proprietor's old
complaints; and the experts, perhaps for the record, fall in with
the senators. From time to time they propose that the old captain
of industry be given a rebirth with full benefit of governmental
midwifery. Such proposals are the best that official liberals have
to say about the economic facts of life. Their mood ought to be
the mood of plight, but they have succeeded in setting up a
40 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
bright image of the small entrepreneur, who could be rehabili-
tated as the hero of their imagined system, if only competition
were once more to prevail.
2. The Independent Farmer
In making its terms with corporate business, farm entrepre-
neurship is in part becoming more like business management,
and in part meeting its problems with the help and support of
political power. All interests have come to look to government,
but the independent farmer has, in some respects, succeeded
more than others in turning the federal establishment into a
public means for his private economic ends. The world of the
farmer, especially its upper third, is now intricately related to
the world of big government, forming with it a combination of
private and public enterprise wherein private gains are insured
and propped by public funds. The independent farmer has be-
come politically dependent; he no longer belongs to a world of
straightforward economic fact.
From on top, farming has recently been a good business propo-
sition. Among the upper farm strata are included canners and
packers and other processors and distributors, as well as those
who look on the land as an investment only. For while the top-
level farmers do buy more land during prosperity, business in-
terests buy land and move into farm profits in other ways, during
slumps as well as booms. Despite the great increase in produc-
tivity, the rapid increase in population, the vast expansion in
demand for farm products, the free land available for home-
steading— despite all this, the proportion of the rural real-estate
owned by working farmers has declined for over half a century.
CentraHzation has brought consolidated farming and farm
chains, run like corporate units by central management. In 1938,
one insurance company alone owned enough acreage to make a
mile-wide farm from New York to Los Angeles. Industrial and
financial interests that have invested in farm properties are active
agents for rational methods of production and management.
They have the money to buy the machines and employ the en-
gineers. Even where they do not invest, own, or manage directly,
they take over processing and marketing. By the middle 'thirties,
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 41
five tobacco companies bought over half the total crop; four meat
packers processed two-thirds of all meat animals slaughtered;
thirteen flour mills processed 65 per cent of all the wheat mar-
keted.
Thus the farmer must deal with the business interests closing
in on the processing and the distributing of his product. He must
also deal with those who sell him what he needs: he must buy
most of his farm implements from one of the four industrial firms
which in 1936 sold more than three-fourths of all important farm
implements. His only recourse has been to keep prices as high
as the traffic will bear. And he has attempted to do so by replac-
ing the dictates of the free market by the edicts of political pol-
icy, to suspend the laws of supply and demand so as to guarantee
a stable market and price bottoms. Only in so far as he was able
to create an effective collusive control of the market by political
tactics could the farmer hope to deal with modem business and
with modern life on something like an equal footing.
In subsidizing free private enterprise, the New Deal paid spe-
cial attention to the old rural middle class. In brief, the New
Deal farm program attempted to transfer to the farm sector of
the economy the well-known practices of the industrial sector; it
taught the farmer the value of producing less in order not to
break prevailing prices. To protect this 'race of free men in the
open country' from the evils of free competition, it paid them
subsidies or benefits to curtail their production. The Federal Gov-
ernment, one might say, became the farmer's executive com-
mittee.
Since the 'thirties, the government has tried to curtail produc-
tion by paying benefits to farmers who raised less; it has bought
up 'surplus' farm produce which threatened to break prices;
it has paid direct subsidies in order to make up differences be-
tween market prices and estabHshed price minimums. And in the
spring of 1949 it was proposed by the Secretary of Agriculture
that, instead of keeping the prices of specific crops at parity,
based on a previous 'good period,' the government should sup-
port the farmers' gross cash income in relation to total national
income. It would work out in such a way as to guarantee the
farmer an annual income comparable to his yearly income over
the past ten boom years.
42 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
The latter-day history of the independent farmer is thus not
a struggle of free producers loosely tied together by an imper-
sonal market; it is a history of various attempts made by politi-
cians and civil servants to raise and maintain agricultural prices.
Failing in this, the farmers' political agents have arranged to
compensate out of public funds the independent enterpriser who
has become the victim of the free market.
The eflPectiveness of such measures, accompanied by war-time
expansion, is amply attested. During World War II, land val-
ues went up more than during the First World War. Total
farm income and cash receipts from crops in 1946 were five times
higher than in 1932. The per-capita income of the farmers was
almost tripled. By 1945, well over half of all farm operators were
full owners of the land they worked and the proportion of farm
tenants had dropped to about one-third; mortgage debt as a
percentage of total farm value had declined from 23 per cent in
1935 to about 12 per cent.
Urban people helped pay for this rural prosperity, not only in
taxes but directly in food costs, which make up about 40 per cent
of the average family budget. In 1940, the budgeted cost of pub-
lic money paid to agriculturists was about one-tenth of the na-
tion's food bill. Given the lack of adequate price control, the war-
born widening of markets acted during the 'forties to keep most
farm prices well above government-supported levels. Just as the
contraction of the foreign markets contributed to the farmer's
collapse in the 'twenties, so in the 'forties its expansion aided in
the farmer's rehabilitation. Between the middle 'thirties and the
middle 'forties the average value of agricultural exports rose more
than threefold. But this was a different kind of 'foreign market';
born of war, it was run, regulated, and price-controlled by a pro-
farmer government. The domestic market also, after seven lean
years of mass unemployment, was fattened by the war economy.
The farmer has been able to get governmental largesse because
he enjoys three distinct political advantages. First, within the
constitutional system the farmer is over-represented. By virtue
of the geographical shape of the Senate, territorial rather than
demographic, the farm bloc is one of the most powerful bodies
in the formal government. New York's millions of employees and
Nebraska's thousands of farmers each have two senators. Sec-
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 43
ond, beginning in the early 'twenties, the farmer has built a set
of pressure groups that has become perhaps the strongest single
bloc in Washington; the American Farm Bureau is knit into the
very structure of the governmental system. It speaks frankly not
of 'one man alone individualism' but of 'powerful organized
groups competing for economic advantage.' Third, the farmer
has enjoyed an unusual degree of public moral support.
The farmers who are benefited by propped-up prices are more
likely to be of the upper third who sell so much than the middle
or lower third who sell so little. Even in the boom, the long-term
trends of concentration remain evident. It is a narrowed upper
stratum of businesslike, politically alert farmers who are flourish-
ing, not a world of small entrepreneurs. And in this boom, based
on political prices and increased productivity, the old forces, as
well as many new ones, are still at work. And there is still the
old contradiction: who will buy the flood of goods that the motors
of technology are turning out? By the fall of 1948 agricultural
planning was beginning to raise all the questions that beset it in
the 'thirties. The Secretary of Commerce called for huge ex-
ports; the farm lobby and its Department of Agriculture called
for more. 'What the Europeans thought and what they wanted
was something else again,' wrote the editors of Fortune. 'It is a
little silly ... to preach the free market in one breath and in
the next propound what amounts to a cartel system in agricul-
ture.'
Farming may be seen (1) as a way of livelihood determining
the life of its worker-owner; (2) as a real-estate investment from
which owners, with the aid of others' work and political help,
derive profit; or (3) in the efiicient eyes of the state in a period
of permanent war economy, as a natural resource and a piece of
equipment that must be geared to the national usage.
Each of these three views entails different images of the
farmer: land as livelihood means 'the farmer' as unalienated
entrepreneur; land as productive real estate means 'the farmer'
as big investor financially exploiting the landless worker; and
there is this third image, which may be that of the future: land
as equipment, and 'the farmer' as a salaried expert. Today the
44 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
American land is seen in all three ways, and there are, in fact,
all three types of 'farmers.'
In the rhetoric of many farm spokesmen, farming as a business
is disguised as farming as a way of life. The Second World War
and its economic consequences saved the poUtically dependent
farmer; the era of militarized economies may ruin him. The norm
of rational efficiency, uppermost in war, is clearly violated by the
system of present-day agriculture. Mihtary and technological
needs may take ascendance over economic greed and political
fixing. Alongside the small independent farmer, a new breed of
men might come onto the land, men who never were owners and
do not expect to be, men who, like factory employees, manage
and work the big machines. Then farming would take its place,
not as the center of a social world as formerly, nor as a politically
secured heirloom of free enterprise, but as one national industry
among other intricate, rationalized departments of production.
In the meantime, farming is less a morally ascendant way of
life than an industry; appreciation of the family farm as a special
virtue-producing unit in a world of free men is today but a nos-
talgic mood among deluded metropolitan people. Moreover, it
is an ideological veil for larger business layouts whose economic
ally and ultimate victim the politically dependent farmer may
well become.
3. The Small Business Front
Images of small men usually arise and persist widely only be-
cause big men find good use for them. Businessmen had not been
taken as exemplars of the small individual, as were farmers, until
in the twentieth century the small businessman arose as a coun-
ter-image to the big businessman. Then big business began to
promulgate and use the image of the small businessman. Such
spokesmen have been gravely concerned about the fate of small
business because, in their rhetoric, small business is the last
urban representative of free competition and thus of the com-
petitive virtues of the private enterprise system.
In any well-conducted Senate hearing on economic issues,
someone always says that the small entrepreneur is the backbone
of the American economy, that he maintains the thousands of
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 45
smaller cities, and that, especially in these cities, he is the very
flower of the American way. 'It is the small businessman who
has become so closely identified with the many hundreds of vil-
lages and cities of this land that he is the very foundation of the
hometown's growth and development.' Perhaps giant monopolies
do exist, the image runs, but, after all, they are of the big city;
it is in the small towns, the locus of real Americans, that the
small businessman thrives.
Quite apart from the larger interests the small-town small-
liusiness stratum serves and the nostalgia its existence taps, there
is a solid reason why people hold so firmly to its image. In these
towns the old urban middle class has been the historic carrier
of what is called civic spirit, which in the American town has
involved a widespread participation in local affairs on the part
of those able to benefit a community by voluntary management
of its public enterprises. These enterprises range from having the
streets properly cleaned to improving the parks; as a matter of
fact, they often seem to have something to do with real estate,
in one way or another. The history of the civic spirit reveals that
for the old middle class, especially the small merchants, it has
meant a businesslike participation in civic matters.
For this role, the old middle-class individual was well fitted:
he often had the necessary time and money; his success in his
small business has, according to the prevailing idea, trained him
for initiative and responsibility; he has been thrown into fairly
continual contact with the administrative and political figures
of the city; and, of course, he has often stood to benefit economi-
cally from civic endeavor and improvement. 'It is just good busi-
ness to be somebody civically,' said a prosperous merchant, who
was.
Yet economic self-interest has not been the whole motive; civic
participation has also involved competition among small busi-
nessmen for prestige. They compete economically as business-
men, they compete civically as democratic citizens. Because of
their local economic roots, they are truly local men; they wish
to win standing in their city. If some are bigger businessmen
than others, still the width of the stratum as a whole is not so
great that those at the bottom could not see and aspire to the top.
46 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
Traditionally, the lower classes have also participated in civic
euphoria, but only as an adjunct of businessmen. They have
identified themselves with businessmen in such a way as to
feel that this identification was with the town itself. This under-
side of civic spirit has been possible, first, because small plants
and shops tended to make informal the relations between workers
and businessmen; second, because the existence of many firms,
graded in sizes, made it possible for the entrepreneurial system
to extend, at least psychologically, to the working class; and
third, because the population of small-business cities has grown
rather slowly and, compared with cities subject to the booms of
big business and rapid metropolitan mobility, has been the result
more of natural increase than of migration. This rate and type of
growth have meant that more of the people of the small city and
its adjoining area 'grew up together,' and, in smaller towns, went
to the same public schools. So the very pattern of city growth has
made for an easier identification between classes and therefore
for greater civic identification.
As the economic position and power of the small entrepreneur
has declined, especially since the First World War, this old pat-
tern of civic prestige, and hence civic spirit, has been grievously
modified. In some smaller cities the mark of the big-business way
is a bolder mark than in others, yet in all of them the new order
is modifying the prestige and power of the small-business com-
munity.
The place of the small businessman in the class pattern of vari-
ous smaller cities differs in accordance with the degree and type
of industrialization, and with the extent to which one or two big
firms dominate the city's labor market. But the over-all decline
of small-business prestige is now fairly standard.
At the top of the occupational-income ranking are big-business
people and executives. Next are small businessmen and free pro-
fessionals, followed by higher salaried white-collar people, and
then lower salaried oflBce workers and foremen. At the bottom
is labor of all grades. But no objective measure of stratification
necessarily coincides with the social and civic prestige which
various members of these strata enjoy. An examination of the
images which the people of each level have of the people on all
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 47
Other levels reveals one major fact: small business (and white-
collar) people occupy the most ambiguous social positions. It is
as if the city's population were polarized into two groups, big
business and labor, and everyone else were thrown together into
a vague 'middle class.'
Wage-workers, to whom small businessmen are often the most
visible element of the 'higher-ups,' do not readily distinguish
between small business and the upper class in general. Wage-
worker families ascribe prestige and power to the small business-
man without really seeing the position he holds vis-d-vis the
upper classes. 'Shopkeepers,' says a lower-class woman, 'they go
in the higher brackets. Because they are on the higher level. They
don't humble themselves to the poor.'
The upper-class person, on the other hand, places the small
businessman, especially the retailer, much lower in the scale
than he does the larger businessman, especially the industrialist.
Both the size and the type of business are explicitly used as pres-
tige criteria by the upper classes, among whom the socially new,
larger, industrial entrepreneurs and their colleagues, the officials
of absentee corporations, rank small business rather low because
of the local nature of its activities. They gauge prestige mainly
by the economic scope of a man's business and his social and
business connections with members of nationally known firms.
The old-family rentier, usually rich from real estate, ranks small
businessmen low because of the way he feels about their back-
ground and education, 'the way they live.' Both of these upper-
class elements more or less agree with the sentiment expressed by
an old-family banker: 'Business ethics are higher, more broad-
minded, more stable among industrialists, as over against retail-
ers. We all know that.'
Small businessmen are of the generally upper ranks only in
income, and then, usually, only during boom times; in terms of
family origin, intermarriage, job history, and education, more
of them than of any other higher income group are lower class.
In these respects, a good proportion of the small businessmen
have close biographical connections with the wage-worker strata.
In the small city there is rigidity at the bottom and at the top—
except as regards small businessmen who, compared with other
income groups, have done a great deal of moving up the line.
48 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
These facts help to explain the different images of small busi-
nessmen held by members of upper and of lower strata. The old
upper class judges more by status and 'background'; the lower
class more by income and the appearances to which it readily
leads.
When a big business moves into a town, the distribution of
social prestige and civic effort changes; as big business enlarges
its economic and political power, it creates a new social world
in its image. Just as the labor markets of the smaller cities have
been dominated, so also have their markets for prestige. The
chief local executives of the corporations, the $10,000 to $25,000
a year men, gain the top social positions, displacing the former
social leaders of the city. Local men begin to realize that their
social standing depends upon association with the leading offi-
cials of the absentee firms; they struggle to follow the officials'
style of living, to move into their suburbs, to be invited to their
social affairs, and to marry their own children into these circles.
Those whose incomes do not permit full realization of what has
happened to the social world, or who refuse to recognize its
dynamic, either become eccentric dwarfs of the new status sys-
tem, or, perhaps without recognizing it, begin to imitate in curi-
ous miniature the new ways of the giants. When the big firm
comes to the small city the wives of its officialdom become models
for the local women of the old middle class. The often glamorous
women of the firm's officials come and go between the metro-
politan center and their exclusive suburb of the small city. In
the eyes of the small businessman's wife who has Not Been In-
vited one sees the social meaning of the decline of the old middle
class.
No matter how much or in what way the old middle class re-
sists, the distribution of prestige follows in due course the distri-
bution of economic and political power in the city. The ambigu-
ous status of small business people in this new world of prestige
has to do with their power position as well as their social back-
ground. In the polarization of the small city, both prestige and
power become concentrated at the top: the big business people
monopolize both.
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 49
Such power as the local business community has is organized
in the Chamber of Commerce, to which most small businessmen
belong. Yet everyone in the town who is politically literate feels
that the larger firms 'run the town.' Many small businessmen will
say so in semi-private contexts. 'If you live in this town/ a drug-
gist says, 'you just know you're working for [the big plants],
whether you're working in their plants or not.'
One of the most powerful weapons the large corporations pos-
sess is the threat to leave town; this veto is in effect the power
of life or death over the economic life of the town, affecting the
town's bank, the Chamber of Commerce, small businessmen,
labor, and city oflBcials alike. The history of its use in many
smaller cities proves how effective it can be. To show their dis-
approval of a city project, big corporation ofiBcials may withdraw
from the activities of the sponsoring organization, absenting
themselves from meetings, or withholding financial support. But
these methods, although they are used and are effective, are often
too direct. Increasingly, large business mobilizes small-business-
small-town sentiment, and uses it as a front. Where real power
has consequences that many people do not like, there is need for
the noisy appearance of power little business can provide. The
old middle class is coming to serve a crucial purpose, as a con-
cealing ia.ga.de, in the psychology of civic prestige. 'They don't
want it to appear that they control things,' an assistant manager
of a Chamber of Commerce said. Nevertheless, 'they' do.
This use of small businessmen in big business towns can
paralyze the civic will of the middle classes and confuse their
efforts. Small business is out in front, busily accomplishing all
sorts of minor civic projects, taking praise— and blame— from the
rank-and-file citizenry. Among those in the lower classes who for
one reason or another are anti-business, the small businessmen
are often the target of aggression and blame; but from the lower-
class individual who is pro-business or neutral, the small busi-
nessmen get high esteem because 'they are doing a lot for this
city.'
The prestige often imputed to small businessmen by lower-
class members is based largely on ascribed power, but neither
this prestige nor this power is always claimed, and certainly it
is not often cashed in among the upper classes. The upper-class
50 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
businessman knows the actual power set-up; but if he or his
cHque is using small businessmen for some project, he may
shower them with public prestige although he does not accept
them or allow them more power than he can retain in his in-
direct control.
The political and economic composition of a well-run Cham-
ber of Commerce enables it to borrow the prestige and power
of the top strata; its committees include the 'leaders' of prac-
tically every voluntary association, including labor unions;
within its organizations and through its contacts, it is able vir-
tually to monopolize the organization and publicity talent of
the city. Thus identifying its program with the unifying myth
of the 'community interest,' big business, even in the home
town, often toys with little business as a wilful courtesan treats
an elderly adorer.
Yet the small businessman, in small city and in metropolitan
area, cHngs stubbornly to the identity, 'business is business,'
and his ideology rests upon his identification with business as
such. The benefits derived from good relations with higher-ups,
and the prestige-striving oriented toward the big men, tend to
strengthen this identification; and this identification is ener-
getically organized and actively promoted by the very organi-
zations formed and supported by small businessmen,
A knowing business journal writes about the Fair Deal's woo-
ing of small business: 'You can be pretty flexible in defining a
"small business." Everyone outside the Big Three or Big Four
you find at the top of most industries is small in Truman's eyes.
And in the name of Small Business, you can do things to direct
and stimulate the economy that would be politically diflBcult
under any other label.'
Actually, small business is by no means unified in its outlook,
nor agreed upon what it wants, as is evidenced by the disunity
and weakness of the small-business national-trade associations.
There are many such organizations but the largest probably
has less than 5000 members; each is tied primarily to one line
of business, which usually includes large as well as small firms.
The small businessman sees first of all the conditions of his own
industry in his local market, although the problem he has in
common with all other small businessmen arises from the con-
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 51
centration process; to see that process for what it is requires an
act of abstraction of which any significant number of small
businessmen seem incapable.
The small-business wing of the old middle class stands in con-
trast to the farmer wing, whose political force is being used
nationally and with great success. Nationally, the small busi-
nessman is overpowered, politically and economically, by big
business; he therefore tries to ride with and benefit from the
success of big business on the national political front, even as
he fights the economic effects of big business on the local and
state front. The local businessman is usually against only the
unfair chain and the monster department store, and does not see
the national movement. This is understandable: some 70 per cent
of small businessmen are retail tradesmen; while they cannot see
the big manufacturer so clearly, any new channel of distribution
is right before their eyes, and evokes their resentment because
they can immediately feel its competition.
There is reason in the small businessman's point that business,
large or small, when contrasted with the consuming public, is
after all business. The problem of small business is, in the end, a
family quarrel, a quarrel between the big and the small capi-
talist over the distribution of available profits. The small capital-
ist desires profits to be more 'equally' divided within the 'business
community'— that is what the restoration of free private compe-
tition means to him. Yet, at the same time that small firms are
being driven to the wall, they are being used by the big firms
with whom they publicly identify themselves. This fact under-
lies the ideology and the frustration of the small urban capitalist;
it is the reason why his aggression is directed at labor and gov-
ernment.
Being closer to labor by social origin and business contact,
small businessmen can the more easily magnify and develop re-
sentments against labor's power. Being closer to them on eco-
nomic levels, they are quick to observe any shifts in their rela-
tive economic positions. As an employer of labor the small busi-
ness stratum, Rudolf Hilferding wrote in 1910, comes into 'more
acute contradiction to the working class. . .' If the power of
unions is not greater in small enterprises, still the exercise of that
52 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
power seems more drastic; the small concern is less able than the
large one to meet both the higher wages the union wins for its
members and the costs of social security labor obtains from the
state welfare coffers. As labor unions have organized and devel-
oped their political pressure, especially over the last fifteen years,
and as wages went up during World War II, the small business-
man readily developed a deep resentment, which fed his anti-
labor ideology. He always says the working man is a fine fellow,
but these unions are bad, and their leaders are still worse.
His attitude toward 'labor' magnifies its power, and his resent-
ment takes a personal form: 'Think of the tremendous wages be-
ing paid to laboring men ... all out of proportion to what they'
should be paid ... a number of them have spoken to me, say-
ing they are ashamed to be taking the wages.' And another one
says: 'I had a young man cash a check at the store on Monday
evening for $95.00. . . We would not class him as half as good
as our clerks in our store. . .'
It is this feeling that makes it possible for big business to use
small business as a shield. In any melee between big business
and big labor, the small entrepreneurs seem to be more often
on the side of business. It is as if the closer to bankruptcy they
are, the more frantically they cling to their ideal. But much as
they cling to big business, they do not look to it as the solver of
their troubles; for this, strangely enough, they look to govern-
ment. The little businessman believes, 'We are victims of circum-
stances. My only hope is in Senator Murray, who, I feel sure,
will do all in his power to keep the little businessman who, he
knows, has been the foundation of the country [etc.]. . . We all
know no business can survive selling ... at a loss, which is my
case today, on the new cost of green coffee.'
Yet, while he looks to government for economic aid and po-
litical comfort, the independent businessman is, at the same time,
resentful of its regulations and taxation, and he has vague feel-
ings that larger powers are using government against him. And
his attitude toward government is blended with estimates of his
own virtue, for the criterion of man is success on Main Street:
'Another thing that I resent very much is the fact that most of
these organizations are headed by men who are not able to make
a success in private life and have squeezed into WPA [sic] and
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 53
gotten over us and are telling us what to do, and it is to me
very resentful. And all these men here know of people who head
these organizations, who were not able to make a living on Main
Street before/
Small business's attitude toward government, as toward labor,
plays into the hands of big-business ideology. In both connec-
tions, small businessmen are shock troops in the battle against
labor unions and government controls.
Big government, organized labor, big business, as well as im-
mediate competitors, prepare the soil of anxiety for small busi-
ness; the ideological growth of this anxiety is thus deeply rooted
in fears, which, though often misplaced, are not without founda-
tion. Big business exploits in its own interests the very anxieties
it has created for small business.
Many of the problems to which Nazism provided one kind of
solution have by no means been solved in America. 'The ultimate
success of national socialism,' A. R. L. Gurland, O. Kirchheimer,
and F. Neumann have recalled, 'was due to a large extent to its
ability to use the frustrations of [small-business] groups for its
own purposes. Small business wanted to retain its independence
and have an adequate income. But it was not allowed to do this.
The Nazis directed the resentment of small businessmen against
labor and against the Weimar Republic, which appeared to be,
and to some extent was, the creation of the German labor move-
ment . . . the frustrations of small businessmen, created pri-
marily by the process of concentration, were not directed against
the industrial and financial monopolists, but against those groups
that appeared to have attained more security at the expense of
small business. . . Thus, national socialism was able to organize
small business by promising it the coming of a Golden Age. . .
While victimized by the Government's tax policy and trade re-
strictions, small business was mortally hit by the spread of infla-
tion which devoured its economies. This from the very beginning
determined the political orientation which small business was to
follow under the Republic. Assistance was expected from those
parties which seemed able to resist labor and labor-influenced
Government.' Policies that emphasized the middle-class aim of
maintaining the status quo between the balance of social forces
and promised legal measures to further and protect independent
54 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
middle-class elements were welcomed by these elements. 'Small-
business leaders did not mistrust the Nazi party. Did not many
of the Nazi leaders come from the very social stratum to which
they, the small businessmen, belonged? Had not many joined the
party for the very reasons which had made life under the Re-
public unbearable for small businessmen?'
If the small businessman in America is going back on his
spokesmen, he cannot really be blamed, for the spokesmen, with-
out knowing it, have also been going back on the small business-
man. These spokesmen would legally guarantee his chances. But
once guaranteed, a chance becomes a sinecure. All the private
and public virtues that self-help, manly competition, and cupidity
are supposed to foster would be denied the little businessman.
The government would expropriate the very basis of political
freedom and of the free personality. If, as is so frequently insisted
by senators, 'Democracy can exist only in a capitalistic system
in which the life of the individual is controlled by supply and
demand,' then democracy may be finished. It is now frequently
added, however, that to save capitalism, the government 'must
prevent small business from being shattered and destroyed.' The
new way of salvation replaces the old faith in supply and demand
with the hope of governmental aid and legalized comfort. By
trying to persuade the government to ration out the main chance,
large and small business alike are helping to destroy the meaning
of competition in the style of life and the free society of the old
middle classes.
4. Political Persistence
The old middle classes are still the chief anchors of the old
American way, and the old way is still strong. Yet American his-
tory of the last century often seems to be a series of mishaps for
the independent man. Whatever occasional victories he may have
won, this man has been fighting against the main drift of a new
society; even his victories have turned out to be illusory or tem-
porary.
The economic tensions that developed in the world of the small
entrepreneur and took political shape as this world was being
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 55
destroyed were not between classes with and without property.
That conflict was distracted by another, which has determined
the course of U.S. poHtics: Until very recently, pohtical issues
have been fought between holders of small property, mainly
rural, and holders of large property, mainly industrial and finan-
cial. While all the people were not owners, there were too many
who thought they soon would be to fight politically against the
institution of property itself. Politics was sidetracked into a fight
between various sizes and types of property, while more and
more of the population had no property of any size or type, and
increasingly no chance to get[anyj
No U.S. political leader with following (with the possible ex-
ception of Debs with his 900,000 votes in 1912) has ventured
even to discuss seriously the overturning of property relations.
In American politics, those relations have been assumed, their
strength rooted in the small entrepreneur's world, in which work
created property before men's eyes, and in which pursuit of
private gain seemed to be visibly in harmony with the public
good. 'A nation consisting mainly of small capitalists and a gov-
ernment under their control is the outspoken ideal of American
statesmen . . . from Jefferson and Lincoln to Roosevelt and
Wilson,' wrote William Walling, one of the most penetrating
analysts of the Progressive Era. Such a society is viewed in
American political rhetoric as eternal; and no society is thought
to be genuinely civilized until it has obtained the 'social maturity'
of division into small holdings. 'The idea is that the small capi-
talist ought to be a privileged class and ought to rule the country,
and that other classes ought to be prevented from growing too
large, if possible, or at least should be kept from power. . .'
The old middle classes were perhaps at the height of their
political consciousness when they made their last political stand
in the Progressive Era. The fight against plutocracy was a fight
in the name and in the interests of the small capitalist on farm
and in city. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were its
leading rhetoricians. Wilson, who represented the whole system
of business, regarded it as a system in which government should
abolish private monopolies and hold any large interests which
are not monopolies 'in their places.' Small businesses, he insisted,
are to be provided for the whole population; each generation
56 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
should look forward 'to becoming not employees but heads of
small, it may be, but hopeful businesses.' Could Wilson imagine
any U.S. government except a government of small capitalists?
In Roosevelt's version, new classes, according to Walling, were
'to be admitted to power, but only as they become small capi-
talists: "Ultimately we desire to use the government to aid, as
far as safely can be done, the industrial tool users to become in
part tool-owners just as the farmers now are." ' 'The growth in
the complexity of community life,' said Roosevelt, 'means the
partial substitution of collectivism for individualism, not to de-
stroy, but to save, individualism.'
The two general lines of strategy taken by hberal theorists and
old middle-class politicians, led by these two men, were: (1) The
view as expressed by Herbert Croly— and Theodore Roosevelt—
that large concentrations of property should be fought indirectly.
By bringing them under governmental control, through taxation
and governmental guidance, he hoped to make monopolies func-
tion in the interest of public welfare, to make big business honest
and respectable, in the manner of little business, and to give
more little businesses the chance to become big. (2) Following
the traditional JeflFersonian animus, the view of Louis D. Bran-
deis and Woodrow Wilson, the view that favored the outright
breaking up of large monopolies and the restoration of the world
of small free men. However the expedient details may have dif-
fered, American liberalism has based its main hope for democracy
on the hope that the small capitalist, doing his own work, or
working for others only until he sets up for himself, would con-
trol the wealth of the country.
'Progressive' political movements have thus been technologi-
cally reactionary, in the literal sense; they have been carried on
by those who were defending small property by waging war
against large concentrations of property. Breaks in the major
parties have been breaks caused by conflicting tendencies among
old middle-class politicians. In 1912, for example, when Theo-
dore Roosevelt broke away from the Republican party with his
Bull Moose campaign, he was on the one hand fighting those who
wanted to give absolutely free reign to monopolies, and on the
other restraining the nomination of LaFollette as a Republican
candidate. As Matthew Josephson has shown, the small men
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 57
who feared and hated monopolies,' who wished 'to make secure
the small property holder's way of life . . .' gave and received
support from LaFollette; it was primarily for such little men that
twelve years later, in 1924, the largest third-party vote in the
history of the United States was cast. But through the boom and
into the depression the monopolists continued to grow. The
New Deal— a shifting confusion of dominantly middle-class tend-
encies—did not materially lessen the concentration and the war
continued to facilitate it.
Yet the small entrepreneur has not quit easily. Increasingly his
weapons have become political: a tricky realm reflecting eco-
nomic forces as much or more than political will. While spear-
heading the drive of technology, the enemies of the small entre-
preneur have also fought with political as well as with eco-
nomic weapons. These enemies have been winning without bene-
fit of popular upsurges; their strength has not been people, but
technology and money and war. Their struggle has been hidden,
relentless, and successful.
'Middle-class radicalism' in the United States has been in truth
reactionary, for it could be realized and maintained only if pro-
duction were kept small-scale. The small entrepreneur and his
champions have accepted the basic relations of capitalism, but
have hung back at an early stage, and have gained no leverage
outside the system with which they might resist its unfolding.
In their politics of desperation against large-scale property, small
businessmen and independent farmers have demanded that the
state guarantee the existence and profits of their small properties.
An economy dominated by small-scale factories, shops, and
farms may be integrated by a multitude of transactions between
individual men on free markets. The spread of large enterprises
has diminished the number and areas of those transactions.
Larger areas of modern society are integrated by bureaucratic
units of management, and such market freedom as persists is
more or less confined to higgling and conniving among bureau-
cratic agents, and to areas not yet in the grip of big manage-
ment. The distribution ^f man's independence, in so far as it is
rooted in the ownership and control of his means of livelihood
and his equality of power in the market, is thus drastically nar-
rowed. The free market which co-ordinated the world of the
58 OLD MIDDLE CLASSES
small propertied producers is no longer the chief means of co-
ordination.
No longer mechanisms of an impersonal adjustment, nor sov-
ereign guides of the productive process, prices are now the object
of powerful bargainings between the political blocs of big busi-
ness, big farmers, and big labor. Price changes are signals of the
relative powers of these interest blocs rather than signals of
demand and supply on the part of scattered producers and con-
sumers. War, slump, and boom increase this managed balance
of power as against the self-balance of the old free market society.
Other means of integration are indeed now needed to prop up
what old market mechanisms still work. In three or four gen-
erations the United States has passed from a loose scatter of
enterprisers to an increasingly bureaucratic co-ordination of spe-
cialized occupational structures. Its economy has become a bu-
reaucratic cage.
Political freedom and economic security have different mean-
ings and different bases in the social structure that has resulted
from the centralization of property. When widely distributed
properties are the dominant means of independent livelihood,
men are free and secure within the limits of their abilities and
the framework of the market. Their political freedom does not
contradict their economic security; both are rooted in ownership.
Political power, resting upon this ownership, is evenly enough
distributed to secure political freedom; economic security,
founded upon one man's property, is not the basis for another
man's insecurity. Control over the property with which one works
is the keystone of a classic democratic system which, for a while,
united political freedom and economic security.
But the centralization of property has shifted the basis of eco-
nomic security from property ownership to job holding; the
power inherent in huge properties has jeopardized the old balance
which gave political freedom. Now unlimited freedom to do as
one wishes with one's property is at the same time freedom to
do what one wishes to the freedom and the security of thousands
of dependent employees. For the employees, freedom and secu-
rity, both political and economic, can no longer rest upon indi-
vidual independence in the old sense. To be free and to be secure
THE RHETORIC OF COMPETITION 59
is to have an effective control over that upon which one is de-
pendent: the job within the centralized enterprise.
The broad linkage of enterprise and property, the cradle-con-
dition of classic democracy, no longer exists in America. This is
no society of small entrepreneurs— now they are one stratum
among others: above them is the big money; below them, the
alienated employee; before them, the fate of politically depend-
ent relics; behind them, their world.
TWO
White Collar Worlds
4
The New Middle Class, I
In the early nineteenth century, although there are no exact
figures, probably four-fifths of the occupied population were
self-employed enterprisers; by 1870, only about one-third, and
in 1940, only about one-fifth, were still in this old middle class.
Many of the remaining four-fifths of the people who now earn
a living do so by working for the 2 or 3 per cent of the popu-
lation who now own 40 or 50 per cent of the private property
in the United States. Among these workers are the members of
the new middle class, white-collar people on salary. For them,
as for wage-workers, America has become a nation of employees
for whom independent property is out of range. Labor markets,
not control of property, determine their chances to receive in-
come, exercise power, enjoy prestige, learn and use skills.
1. Occupational Change
Of the three broad strata composing modern society, only the
new middle class has steadily grown in proportion to the whole.
Eighty years ago, there
were three-quarters of a The Labor Force 1870 1940
million middle-class em- old Middle Class 33% 20%
ployees; by 1940, there New Middle Class 6 25
were over twelve and a Wage-Workers 61 55
half million. In that period j^j^ 100% 100%
the old middle class in-
63
64 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
creased 135 per cent; wage-workers, 255 per cent; new middle
class, 1600 per cent.*
The employees composing the new middle class do not make
up one single compact stratum. They have not emerged on a
single horizontal level, but have been shuffled out simultaneously
on the several levels of modem society; they now form, as it
were, a new pyramid within the old pyramid of society at large,
rather than a horizontal layer. The great bulk of the new middle
class are of the lower middle-income brackets, but regardless of
how social stature is measured, types of white-collar men and
women range from almost the top to almost the bottom of
modern society.
The managerial stratum, subject to minor variations during
these decades, has dropped slightly, from 14 to 10 per cent; the
salaried professionals, dis-
New MroDLE Class 1870 1940 playing the same minor
ups and downs, have
dropped from 30 to 25
per cent of the new mid-
dle class. The major shifts
T^td 100% 100% in over-all composition
have been in the relative
decline of the sales group, occurring most sharply around 1900,
from 44 to 25 per cent of the total new middle class; and the
steady rise of the office workers, from 12 to 40 per cent. Today
the three largest occupational groups in the white-coUar stratum
are schoolteachers, salespeople in and out of stores, and assorted
office workers. These three form the white-coUar mass.
White-collar occupations now engage well over half the mem-
bers of the American middle class as a whole. Between 1870 and
1940, white-collar workers rose from 15 to 56 per cent of the
middle brackets, while the old middle class declined from 85 to
44 per cent:
* For the sources of the figures in Part n, see Sources and Acknowl-
edgments. In the tables in this section, figures for the intermediate
years are appropriately graded; the change has been more or less
steady.
Managers
14%
10%
Salaried Professionals
30
25
Salespeople
44
25
Office Workers
12
40
OLD MIDDLE CLASS
85%
44%
Farmers
62
23
Businessmen
21
19
Free Professionals
2
2
NEW MIDDLE CLASS
15%
56%
Managers
2
6
Salaried Professionals
: 4
14
Salespeople
7
14
OflBce Workers
2
22
Total Middle Classes 100% 100%
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, I 65
Negatively, the trans- The Middle Classes 1870 1940
formation of the middle
class is a shift from prop-
erty to no-property; posi-
tively, it is a shift from
property to a new axis of
stratification, occupation.
The nature and well-
being of the old middle
class can best be sought
in the condition of entre-
preneurial property; of
the new middle class, in the economics and sociology of occu-
pations. The numerical decline of the older, independent sectors
of the middle class is an incident in the centralization of prop-
erty; the numerical rise of the newer salaried employees is due
to the industrial mechanics by which the occupations composing
the new middle class have arisen.
2. industrial Mechanics
In modern society, occupations are specific functions within a
social division of labor, as well as skills sold for income on a
labor market. Contemporary divisions of labor involve a hitherto
unknown specialization of skill: from arranging abstract symbols,
at $1000 an hour, to working a shovel, for $1000 a year. The
major shifts in occupations since the Civil War have assumed
this industrial trend: as a proportion of the labor force, fewer
individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols.
This shift in needed skills is another way of describing the
rise of the white-collar workers, for their characteristic skills in-
volve the handling of paper and money and people. They are
expert at dealing with people transiently and impersonally; they
are masters of the commercial, professional, and technical rela-
tionship. The one thing they do not do is live by making things;
rather, they Hve off the social machineries that organize and co-
ordinate the people who do make things. White-collar people
help turn what someone else has made into profit for still an-
Producing
11%
46%
Servicing
13
20
Distributing
7
23
Co-ordinating
3
11
66 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
other; some of them are closer to the means of production, super-
vising the work of actual manufacture and recording what is
done. They are the people who keep track; they man the paper
routines involved in distributing what is produced. They provide
technical and personal services, and they teach others the skills
which they themselves practice, as well as all other skills trans-
mitted by teaching.
As the proportion of workers needed for the extraction and
production of things declines,
1870 1940 t}je proportion needed for serv-
icing, distributing, and co-ordi-
nating rises. In 1870, over three-
fourths, and in 1940, slightly
less than one-half of the total
Total employed 100% 100% employed were engaged in pro-
ducing things.
By 1940, the proportion of white-collar workers of those em-
ployed in industries primarily involved in the production of
things was 11 per cent; in service industries, 32 per cent; in dis-
tribution, 44 per cent; and in co-ordination, 60 per cent. The
white-collar industries themselves have growTi, and within each
industry the white-collar occupations have grown. Three trends
lie back of the fact that the white-collar ranks have thus been
the most rapidly growing of modem occupations: the increasing
productivity of machinery used in manufacturing; the magnifi-
cation of distribution; and the increasing scale of co-ordination.
The immense productivity of mass-production technique and
the increased application of technologic rationality are the first
open secrets of modem occupational change: fewer men turn
out more things in less time. In the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury, as J. F. Dewhurst and his associates have calculated, some
17.6 billion horsepower hours were expended in American in-
dustry, only 6 per cent by mechanical energy; by the middle of
the twentieth century, 410.4 billion horsepower hours will be
expended, 94 per cent by mechanical energy. This industrial rev-
olution seems to be permanent, seems to go on through war and
boom and slump; thus 'a decline in production results in a more
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, I 67
than proportional decline in employment; and an increase in pro-
duction results in a less than proportional increase in employ-
ment.'
Technology has thus narrowed the stratum of workers needed
for given volumes of output; it has also altered the types and pro-
portions of skill needed in the production process. Know-how,
once an attribute of tlie mass of workers, is now in the machine
and the engineering elite who design it. Machines displace un-
skilled workmen, make craft skills unnecessary, push up front the
automatic motions of the machine-operative. Workers composing
the new lower class are predominantly semi-skilled: their pro-
portion in the urban wage-worker stratum has risen from 31 per
cent in 1910 to 41 per cent in 1940.
The manpower economies brought about by machinery and
the large-scale rationalization of labor forces, so apparent in pro-
duction and extraction, have not, as yet, been applied so exten-
sively in distribution— transportation, communication, finance,
and trade. Yet without an elaboration of these means of distribu-
tion, the wide-flung operations of multi-plant producers could
not be integrated nor their products distributed. Therefore, the
proportion of people engaged in distribution has enormously in-
creased so that today about one-fourth of the labor force is so
engaged. Distribution has expanded more than production be-
cause of the lag in technological application in this field, and
because of the persistence of individual and small-scale entrepre-
neurial units at the same time that the market has been enlarged
and the need to market has been deepened.
Behind this expansion of the distributive occupations lies the
central problem of modern capitalism: to whom can the avail-
able goods be sold? As volume swells, the intensified search for
markets draws more workers into the distributive occupations of
trade, promotion, advertising. As far-flung and intricate markets
come into being, and as the need to find and create even more
markets becomes urgent, 'middle men' who move, store, finance,
promote, and sell goods are knit into a vast network of enterprises
and occupations.
The physical aspect of distribution involves wide and fast
transportation networks; the co-ordination of marketing involves
68 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
communication; the search for markets and the selHng of goods
involves trade, including wholesale and retail outlets as well as
financial agencies for commodity and capital markets. Each of
these activities engage more people, but the manual jobs among
them do not increase so fast as the white-collar' tasks.
Transportation, growing rapidly after the Civil War, began to
decline in point of the numbers of people involved before 1930;
but this decline took place among wage-workers; the proportion
of white-collar workers employed in transportation continued to
rise. By 1940, some 23 per cent of the people in transportation
were white-collar employees. As a new industrial segment of the
U.S. economy, the communication industry has never been run by
large numbers of free enterprisers; at the outset it needed large
numbers of technical and other white-collar workers. By 1940,
some 77 per cent of its people were in new middle-class occu-
pations.
Trade is now the third largest segment of the occupational
structure, exceeded only by farming and manufacturing. A few
years after the Civil War less than 5 out of every 100 workers
were engaged in trade; by 1940 almost 12 out of every 100 work-
ers were so employed. But, while 70 per cent of those in whole-
saling and retailing were free enterprisers in 1870, and less than
3 per cent were white collar, by 1940, of the people engaged in
retail trade 27 per cent were free enterprisers; 41 per cent white-
collar employees.
Newer methods of merchandising, such as credit financing,
have resulted in an even greater percentage increase in the 'finan-
cial' than in the 'commercial' agents of distribution. Branch bank-
ing has lowered the status of many banking employees to the
clerical level, and reduced the number of executive positions. By
1940, of all employees in finance and real estate 70 per cent were
white-coUar workers of the new middle class.
The organizational reason for the expansion of the white-
collar occupations is the rise of big business and big government,
and the consequent trend of modern social structure, the steady
growth of bureaucracy. In every branch of the economy, as finns
merge and corporations become dominant, free entrepreneurs
become employees, and the calculations of accountant, statis-
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, I 69
tician, bookkeeper, and clerk in these corporations replace the
free 'movement of prices' as the co-ordinating agent of the eco-
nomic system. The rise of thousands of big and little bureaucracies
and the elaborate specialization of the system as a whole create
the need for many men and women to plan, co-ordinate, and ad-
minister new routines for others. In moving from smaller to larger
and more elaborate units of economic activity, increased propor-
tions of employees are drawn into co-ordinating and managing.
Managerial and professional employees and oflBce workers of
varied sorts— floorwalkers, foremen, office managers— are needed;
people to whom subordinates report, and who in turn report to
superiors, are links in chains of power and obedience, co-ordinat-
ing and supervising other occupational experiences, functions,
and skills. And all over the economy, the proportion of clerks of
all sorts has increased: from 1 or 2 per cent in 1870 to 10 or 11
per cent of all gainful workers in 1940.
As the worlds of business undergo these changes, the increased
tasks of government on all fronts draw still more people into
occupations that regulate and service property and men. In re-
sponse to the largeness and predatory complications of business,
the crises of slump, the nationalization of the rural economy and
small-town markets, the flood of immigrants, the urgencies of
war and the march of technology disrupting social life, govern-
ment increases its co-ordinating and regulating tasks. Public reg-
ulations, social services, and business taxes require more people
to make mass records and to integrate people, firms, and goods,
both within government and in the various segments of business
and private life. All branches of government have grown, al-
though the most startling increases are found in the executive
branch of the Federal Government, where the needs for co-ordi-
nating the economy have been most prevalent.
As marketable activities, occupations change (1) with shifts
in the skills required, as technology and rationalization are un-
evenly applied across the economy; (2) with the enlargement
and intensification of marketing operations in both the com-
modity and capital markets; and (3) with shifts in the organiza-
tion of the division of work, as expanded organizations require
co-ordination, management, and recording. The mechanics in-
70 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
volved within and between these three trends have led to the
numerical expansion of white-collar employees.
There are other less obvious ways in which the occupational
structure is shaped: high agricultural tariflFs, for example, delay
the decline of farming as an occupation; were Argentine beef
allowed to enter duty-free, the number of meat producers here
might diminish. City ordinances and zoning laws abolish peddlers
and affect the types of construction workers that prevail. Most
states have bureaus of standards which limit entrance into pro-
fessions and semi-professions; at the same time members of these
occupations form associations in the attempt to control entrance
into 'their' market. More successful than most trade unions, such
professional associations as the American Medical Association
have managed for several decades to level off the proportion of
physicians and surgeons. Every phase of the slump-war-boom
cycle influences the numerical importance of various occupations;
for instance, the movement back and forth between 'construc-
tion worker' and small 'contractor' is geared to slumps and booms
in building.
The pressures from these loosely organized parts of the occu-
pational world draw conscious managerial agencies into the pic-
ture. The effects of attempts to manage occupational change,
directly and indirectly, are not yet great, except of course during
wars, when government freezes men in their jobs or offers in-
centives and compulsions to remain in old occupations or shift
to new ones. Yet, increasingly the class levels and occupational
composition of the nation are managed; the occupational struc-
ture of the United States is being slowly reshaped as a gigantic
corporate group. It is subject not only to the pulling of autono-
mous markets and the pushing of technology but to an 'alloca-
tion of personnel' from central points of control. Occupational
change thus becomes more conscious, at least to those who are
coming to be in charge of it.
3. White-Collar Pyramids
Occupations, in terms of which we circumscribe the new mid-
dle class, involve several ways of ranking people. As specific
activities, they entail various types and levels of skill, and their
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, I 71
exercise fulfils certain functions within an industrial division of
labor. These are the sldlls and functions we have been examining
statistically. As sources of income, occupations are connected
with class position; and since they normally carry an expected
quota of prestige, on and off the job, they are relevant to status
position. They also involve certain degrees of power over other
people, directly in terms of the job, and indirectly in other social
areas. Occupations are thus tied to class, status, and power as
well as to skill and function; to understand the occupations com-
posing the new middle class, we must consider them in terms
of each of these dimensions.*
'Class situation' in its simplest objective sense has to do with
the amount and source of income. Today, occupation rather than
property is the source of income for most of those who receive
any direct income: the possibilities of selling their services in the
labor market, rather than of profitably buying and selling their
property and its yields, now determine the life-chances of most
of the middle class. All things money can buy and many that
men dream about are theirs by virtue of occupational income.
In new middle-class occupations men work for someone else on
someone else's property. This is the clue to many differences be-
tween the old and new middle classes, as well as to the contrast
between the older world of the small propertied entrepreneur
and the occupational structure of the new society. If the old
middle class once fought big property structures in the name
of small, free properties, the new middle class, like the wage-
workers in latter-day capitalism, has been, from the beginning,
dependent upon large properties for job security.
Wage-workers in the factory and on the farm are on the prop-
ertyless bottom of the occupational structure, depending upon
the equipment owned by others, earning wages for the time they
spend at work. In terms of property, the white-collar people are
not 'in between Capital and Labor'; they are in exactly the same
property-class position as the wage-workers. They have no direct
' The following pages are not intended as a detailed discussion of
the class, prestige, and power of the white-collar occupations, but as
preliminary and definitional. See Chapter 11 for Status, 12 for Class,
15 for Power.
72 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
financial tie to the means of production, no prime claim upon the
proceeds from property. Like factory workers— and day laborers,
for that matter— they work for those who do own such means of
livelihood.
Yet if bookkeepers and coal miners, insurance agents and farm
laborers, doctors in a clinic and crane operators in an open pit
have this condition in common, certainly their class situations
are not the same. To understand their class positions, we must go
beyond the common fact of source of income and consider as well
the amount of income.
In 1890, the average income of white-collar occupational groups
was about double that of wage-workers. Before World War I,
salaries were not so adversely afiFected by slumps as wages were
but, on the contrary, they rather steadily advanced. Since World
War I, however, salaries have been reacting to turns in the eco-
nomic cycles more and more like wages, although still to a lesser
extent. If wars help wages more because of the greater flexibility
of wages, slumps help salaries because of their greater inflexi-
bility. Yet after each war era, salaries have never regained their
previous advantage over wages. Each phase of the cycle, as well
as the progressive rise of all income groups, has resulted in a nar-
rowing of the income gap between wage-workers and white-
collar employees.
In the middle 'thirties the three urban strata, entrepreneurs,
white-collar, and wage-workers, formed a distinct scale with re-
spect to median family income: the white-collar employees had
a median income of $1,896; the entrepreneurs, $1,464; the urban
wage-workers, $1,175. Although the median income of white-
collar workers was higher than that of the entrepreneurs, larger
proportions of the entrepreneurs received both high-level and
low-level incomes. The distribution of their income was spread
more than that of the white collar.
The wartime boom in incomes, in fact, spread the incomes of
all occupational groups, but not evenly. The spread occurred
mainly among urban entrepreneurs. As an income level, the old
middle class in the city is becoming less an evenly graded income
group, and more a collection of different strata, with a large pro-
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, I 73
portion of lumpen-bourgeoisie who receive very low incomes,
and a small, prosperous bourgeoisie with very high incomes.
In the late 'forties (1948, median family income) the income
of all white-collar workers was $4000, that of all urban wage-
workers, $3300. These averages, however, should not obscure
the overlap of specific groups within each stratum: the lower
white-collar people— sales-employees and ofiBce workers— earned
almost the same as skilled workers and foremen,* but more than
semi-skilled urban wage-workers.
In terms of property, white-collar people are in the same posi-
tion as wage-workers; in terms of occupational income, they are
'somewhere in the middle.' Once they were considerably above
the wage- workers; they haVe become less so; in the middle of the
century they still have an edge but the over-all rise in incomes is
making the new middle class a more homogeneous income group.
As with income, so with prestige: white-collar groups are dif-
ferentiated socially, perhaps more decisively than wage-workers
and entrepreneurs. Wage earners certainly do form an income
pyramid and a prestige gradation, as do entrepreneurs and ren-
tiers; but the new middle class, in terms of income and prestige,
is a superimposed pyramid, reaching from almost the bottom of
the first to almost the top of the second.
People in white-collar occupations claim higher prestige than
wage-workers, and, as a general rule, can cash in their claims
with wage-workers as well as with the anonymous public. This
fact has been seized upon, with much justification, as the defin-
ing characteristic of the white-collar strata, and although there
are definite indications in the United States of a decline in their
prestige, still, on a nation-wide basis, the majority of even the
lower white-collar employees— ofiice workers and salespeople-
enjoy a middling prestige.
The historic bases of the white-collar employees' prestige, apart
from superior income, have included the similarity of their place
and type of work to those of the old middle-classes' which has
* It is impossible to isolate the salaried foremen from the skilled
urban wage-workers in these figures. If we could do so, the income of
lower white-collar workers would be closer to that of semi-skilled
workers.
74 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
permitted them to borrow prestige. As their relations with entre-
preneur and with esteemed customer have become more imper-
sonal, they have borrowed prestige from the firm itself. The
stylization of their appearance, in particular the fact that most
white-collar jobs have permitted the wearing of street clothes
on the job, has also figured in their prestige claims, as have the
skills required in most white-collar jobs, and in many of them
the variety of operations performed and the degree of autonomy
exercised in deciding work procedures. Furthermore, the time
taken to learn these skills and the way in which they have been
acquired by formal education and by close contact with the
higher-ups in charge has been important. White-collar employees
have monopolized high school education— even in 1940 they had
completed 12 grades to the 8 grades for wage-workers and entre-
preneurs. They have also enjoyed status by descent: in terms of
race, Negro white-collar employees exist only in isolated in-
stances—and, more importantly, in terms of nativity, in 1930 only
about 9 per cent of white-collar workers, but 16 per cent of free
enterprisers and 21 per cent of wage-workers, were foreign born.
Finally, as an underlying fact, the limited size of the white-
collar group, compared to wage-workers, has led to successful
claims to greater prestige.
The power position of groups and of individuals typically de-
pends upon factors of class, status, and occupation, often in in-
tricate interrelation. Given occupations involve specific powers
over other people in the actual course of work; but also outside
the job area, by virtue of their relations to institutions of prop-
erty as well as the typical income they afiFord, occupations lend
power. Some white-collar occupations require the direct exer-
cise of supervision over other white-collar and wage-workers,
and many more are closely attached to this managerial cadre.
White-collar employees are the assistants of authority; the power
they exercise is a derived power, but they do exercise it.
Moreover, within the white-collar pyramids there is a charac-
teristic pattern of authority involving age and sex. The white-
collar ranks contain a good many women: some 41 per cent of
all white-collar employees, as compared with 10 per cent of free
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, I 75
enterprisers, and 21 per cent of wage-workers, are women.* As
with sex, so with age: free enterprisers average (median) about
45 years of age, white-collar and wage-workers, about 34; but
among free enterprisers and wage-workers, men are about 2 or
3 years older than women; among white-collar workers, there is
a 6- or 7-year difference. In the white-collar pyramids, authority
is roughly graded by age and sex: younger women tend to be
subordinated to older men.
The occupational groups forming the white-collar pyramids,
different as they may be from one another, have certain common
characteristics, which are central to the character of the new
middle class as a general pyramid overlapping the entrepreneurs
and wage-workers. White-collar people cannot be adequately de-
fined along any one possible dimension of stratification— skill,
function, class, status, or power. They are generally in the middle
ranges on each of these dimensions and on every descriptive at-
tribute. Their position is more definable in terms of their relative
differences from other strata than in any absolute terms.
On all points of definition, it must be remembered that white-
collar people are not one compact horizontal stratum. They do
not fulfil one central, positive function that can define them, al-
though in general their functions are similar to those of the old
middle class. They deal with symbols and with other people,
co-ordinating, recording, and distributing; but they fulfil these
functions as dependent employees, and the skills they thus em-
ploy are sometimes similar in form and required mentality to
those of many wage-workers.
In terms of property, they are equal to wage-workers and dif-
ferent from the old middle class. Originating as propertyless de-
pendents, they have no serious expectations of propertied inde-
pendence. In terms of income, their class position is, on the
average, somewhat higher than that of wage-workers. The over-
lap is large and the trend has been definitely toward less dif-
ference, but even today the differences are significant.
• According to our calculations, the proportions of women, 1940,
in these groups are: farmers, 2.9%; businesmen, 20%; free profes-
sionals, 5.9%; managers, 7.1%; salaried professionals, 51.7%; sales-
people, 27.5% ofiBce workers, 51%; skilled workers, 3.2%; semi-skilled
and unskilled, 29.8%; rural workers, 9.1%.
76 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
Perhaps of more psychological importance is the fact that
white-collar groups have successfully claimed more prestige than
wage- workers and still generally continue to do so. The bases of
their prestige may not be solid today, and certainly they show
no signs of being permanent; but, however vague and fragile,
they continue to mark off white-collar people from wage- workers.
Members of white-collar occupations exercise a derived au-
thority in the course of their work; moreover, compared to older
hierarchies, the white-collar pyramids are youthful and feminine
bureaucracies, within which youth, education, and American birth
are emphasized at the wide base, where millions of office workers
most clearly typify these differences between the new middle
class and other occupational groups. White-collar masses, in turn,
are managed by people who are more like the old middle class,
having many of the social characteristics, if not the independence,
of free enterprisers.
5
The Managerial Demiurge
As the means of administration are enlarged and centralized,
there are more managers in every sphere of modern society, and
the managerial type of man becomes more important in the total
social structure.
These new men at the top, products of a hundred-year shift in
the upper brackets, operate within the new bureaucracies, which
select them for their positions and then shape their characters.
Their role within these bureaucracies, and the role of the bu-
reaucracies within the social structure, set the scope and pace of
the managerial demiurge. So pervasive and weighty are these
bureaucratic forms of life that, in due course, older types of
upper-bracket men shift their character and performance to join
the managerial trend, or sink beneath the upper-bracket men.
In theii" common attempt to deal with the underlying popula-
tion, the managers of business and government have become in-
terlaced by committee and pressure group, by political party and
trade association. Very slowly, reluctantly, the labor leader in his
curious way, during certain phases of the business cycle and
union history, joins them. The managerial demiurge means more
than an increased proportion of people who work and live by
the rules of business, government, and labor bureaucracy; it
means that, at the top, society becomes an uneasy interlocking of
private and public hierarchies, and at the bottom, more and more
areas become objects of management and manipulation. Bureauc-
ratization in the United States is by no means total; its spread is
partial and segmental, and the individual is caught up in several
77
78 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
structures at once. Yet, over-all, the loose-jointed integration of
liberal society is being replaced, especially in its war phases, by
the more managed integration of a corporate-hke society.
1. The Bureaucracies
As an epithet for governmental waste and red tape, the word
^bureaucracy' is a carry-over from the heroic age of capitalism,
when the middle-class entrepreneur was in revolt against mer-
cantile company and monarchist dynasty. That time is now long
past, but the epithet persists in the service of different aims.
In its present common meaning, 'bureaucracy' is inaccurate and
misleading for three major reasons: (1) When the corporation
official objects to 'bureaucracy' he means of course the programs
of the Federal Government, and then only in so far as they seem
to be against the interests of his own private business bureauc-
racy. (2) Most of the waste and inefficiency associated in popu-
lar imagery with 'bureaucracy' is, in fact, a lack of strict and com-
plete bureaucratization. The 'mess,' and certainly the graft, of the
U.S. Army, are more often a result of a persistence of the entre-
preneurial outlook among its personnel than of any bureau-
cratic tendencies as such. Descriptively, bureaucracy refers to
a hierarchy of offices or bureaus, each with an assigned area of
operation, each employing a staff having specialized qualifica-
tions. So defined, bureaucracy is the most efficient type of social
organization yet devised. (3) Government bureaucracies are, in
large part, a public consequence of private bureaucratic develop-
ments, which by centralizing property and equipment have been
the pace setter of the bureaucratic trend. The very size of mod-
ern business, housing the technological motors and financial
say-so, compels the rise of centralizing organizations of formal
rule and rational subdivisions in all sectors of society, most espe-
cially in government.
In business, as the manufacturing plant expands in size, it
draws more people into its administrative scope. A smaller pro-
portion of plants employ a larger proportion of manufacturing
wage earners. Even before World War II concentration, 1 per
cent of all the plants employed over half the workers. These
enlarged plants are knit together in central-office or multi-plant
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 79
enterprises. Less than 6000 such enterprises control the plants
that employ about half of the workers; they have an output val-
ued 760 per cent higher, and a production per wage-worker 19.5
per cent higher, than independent plants. Multi-plant as well as
independent-plant enterprises merge together in various forms
of corporation: by the time of the Great Depression, the 200
largest industrial corporations owned about half of the total in-
dustrial wealth of the country. These large corporations are
linked by their directorships and by trade associations. Adminis-
trative decisions merge into the check and balance of the inter-
locking directorships; in the middle 'thirties some 400 men held
a full third of the 3,544 top seats of the 250 largest corporations.
Supra-corporate trade associations, as Robert Brady has observed,
become 'funnels for the new monopoly,' stabilizing and rational-
izing competing managements economically, and serving as the
political apparatus for the whole managerial demiurge of private
wealth.
The slump-war-boom rhythm makes business bureaucracy grow.
During the crises, the single business concern becomes tied to an
intercorporate world which manages the relations of large busi-
ness and government. The larger and more bureaucratic business
becomes, the more the Federal Government elaborates itself for
purposes of attempted control, and the more business responds
with more rational organization. The bureaucracies of business
tend to duplicate the regulatory agencies of the federal hier-
archy, to place their members within the governmental commis-
sions and agencies, to hire officials away from government, and
to develop elaborate mazes within which are hidden the official
secrets of business operations. Across the bargaining tables of
power, the bureaucracies of business and government face one
another, and under the tables their myriad feet are interlocked
in wonderfully complex ways.
The American governing apparatus has been enlarged, cen-
tralized, and professionalized both in its means of administration
and the staff required. Presidents and governors, mayors and city
managers have gathered into their hands the means of adminis-
tration and the power to appoint and supervise. These officials,
no longer simply political figures who deal mainly with legisla-
tures, have become general managerial chieftains who deal
80 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
mainly with the subordinates of a bureaucratic hierarchy. The
executive branch of modern government has become dynamic,
increasing its functions and enlarging its staflF at the expense of
the legislative and the judicial. In 1929, of all civilian govern-
mental employees 18 per cent were employed in the executive
branch of the Federal Government; in 1947, after the peak of
World War II, the proportion was 37 per cent.
Who are the managers behind the managerial demiurge?
Seen from below, the management is not a Who but a series
of Theys and even Its. Management is something one reports to
in some office, maybe in all offices including that of the union;
it is a printed instruction and a sign on a bulletin board; it is the
voice coming through the loudspeakers; it is the name in the
newspaper; it is the signature you can never make out, except it
is printed underneath; it is a system that issues orders superior
to anybody you know close-up; it blueprints, specifying in detail,
your work-life and the boss-life of your foreman. Management is
the centralized say-so.
Seen from the middle ranks, management is one-part people
who give you the nod, one-part system, one-part yourself. White-
collar people may be part of management, like they say, but man-
agement is a lot of things, not all of them managing. You carry
authority, but you are not its source. As one of the managed,
you are on view from above, and perhaps you are seen as a
threat; as one of the managers, you are seen from below, perhaps
as a tool. You are the cog and the beltline of the bureaucratic
machinery itself; you are a link in the chains of commands, per-
suasions, notices, bills, which bind together the men who make
decisions and the men who make things; without you the mana-
gerial demiurge could not be. But your authority is confined
strictly within a prescribed orbit of occupational actions, and
such power as you wield is a borrowed thing. Yours is the sub-
ordinate's mark, yours the canned talk. The money you handle
is somebody else's money; the papers you sort and shuffle already
bear somebody else's marks. You are the servant of decision, the
assistant of authority, the minion of management. You are closer
to management than the wage-workers are, but yours is seldom
the last decision.
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 81
Seen from close to the top, management is the ethos of the
higher circle: concentrate power, but enlarge your staflF, Down
the line, make them feel a part of what you are a part. Set up a
school for managers and manage what managers learn; open a
channel of two-way communication: commands go down, infor-
mation comes up. Keep a firm grip but don't boss them, boss
their experience; don't let them learn what you don't fell them.
Between decision and execution, between command and obedi-
ence, let there be reflex. Be calm, judicious, rational; groom your
personality and control your appearance; make business a profes-
sion. Develop yourself. Write a memo; hold a conference with
men like you. And in all this be yourself and be human: nod
gravely to the girls in the oflBce; say hello to the men; and always
listen carefully to the ones above: 'Over last week end, I gave
much thought to the information you kindly tendered me on
Friday, especially . . .'
2. From the Top to the Bottom
According to Edwin G. Nourse, recently head of the President's
Council of Economic Advisers, 'Responsibility for determining
the direction of the nation's economic life today and of furnish-
ing both opportunity and incentive to the masses centers upon
some one or two per cent of the gainfully employed.' The man-
agers, as the cadre of the enterprise, form a hierarchy, graded
according to their authority to initiate tasks, to plan and execute
their own work and freely to plan and order the work of others.
Each level in the cadre's hierarchy is beholden to the levels
above. Manager talks with manager and each manager talks with
his assistant managers and to the employees, that is, those who
do not plan work or make decisions, but perform assigned work.
Contact with non-managerial employees probably increases down
the managerial hierarchy: the top men rarely talk to anyone but
secretaries and other managers; the bottom men may have 90
per cent of their contacts with managed employees. In employee
parlance. The Boss is frequently the man who actually gives
orders; the top men are The Higher Ups who are typically unap-
proachable except by the narrow circle directly around them.
82 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
Down the line, managers are typically split into two types:
those who have to do with business decisions and those who
have to do with the industrial run of work. Both are further sub-
divided into various grades of importance, often according to the
number of people under them; both have assigned duties and
fixed requirements; both as groups have been rationalized. The
business managers range from top executives who hold power of
attorney for the entire firm and act in its behalf, to the depart-
ment managers and their assistants under whom the clerks and
machine operators and others work. The industrial managers
range from the production engineer and designer at the top to
the foremen immediately above the workmen at the bottom. The
engineering manager and technician are typically subordinated
to the business and financial manager: in so far as technical and
human skills are used in the modem corporation they serve the
needs of the business side of the corporation as judged by the
business manager. The engineering manager, recruited from
upper middle-income groups, via the universities, is assisted by
lower middle-income people with some technical training and
long experience.
The men at the top of the managerial cadre in business are
formally responsible to stockholders; in government, to the
elected politicians and through them to the people. But neither
are responsible to any other officials or managers; that is what
being at the managerial top means. Often they are the least spe-
cialized men among the bosses; the 'general manager is well
named. Many a business firm is run by men whose knowledge is
financial, and who could not hold down a job as factory super-
intendent, much less chief engineer.
Going from problem to problem and always deciding, like
Tolstoy's generals, when there really is no basis for decision but
only the machine's need for command, the need for no subordi-
nate even to dream the chief is in doubt— that is diJBFerent from
working out some problem alone to its completion. For one thing,
an appointment schedule, set more or less by the operation of the
machine, determines the content and rhythm of the manager's
time, and in fact of his life. For another, he hires and so must
feel that the brains of others belong to him, because he knows
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 83
how to use them. So Monroe Stahr, Scott Fitzgerald's hero in The
Last Tycoon, first wanted to be chief clerk of the works, 'the one
who knows where everything was,' but when he was chief, 'found
out that no one knew where anything was.'
Relations between men in charge of the administrative
branches of government and men who run the expanded cor-
porations and unions are often close. Their collaboration may
occur while each is an official of his respective hierarchy, or by
means of personal shiftings of positions; the labor leader accepts
a government job or becomes the personnel man of a corpora-
tion; the big-business oflBcial becomes a dollar-a-year man; the
government expert accepts a position with the corporation his
agency is attempting to regulate. Just how close the resemblance
between governmental and business officials may be is shown by
the ease and frequency with which men pass from one hierarchy
to another. While such changes may seem mere incidents in an
individual career, the meaning of such interpenetration of mana-
gerial elite goes beyond this, modifying the meaning of the
upper brackets and the objective functions of the several big
organizations.
Higher government officials, as Reinhard Bendix has suggested,
probably come mostly from rural areas and medium-size towns,
from middle-class and lower middle-class families; they have
worked their way through college and often to higher educa-
tional degrees. Their occupational experience prior to govern-
ment work is usually law, business, journalism, or college teach-
ing. In line with general occupational shifts, the tendency over
the last generation has been for fewer officials to come from farms
and more from professional circles. Except perhaps on the very
highest levels, these men do not suffer from lack of incentive,
as compared with business officials. They do, however, tend to
suffer from lack of those privileges of income, prestige, and secu-
rity, which many of them believe comparable officials in large
businesses enjoy.
The officials of business corporations are somewhat older than
comparable government officials. The big companies do not yet
have what experts in efficient bureaucracy would call an ade-
quate system of recruiting for management. There may be even
84 WHITt COLLAR WORLDS
more 'politics' in appointments in the corporate hierarchies than
in Federal Government bureaus. Among bureau heads in Wash-
ington, for instance, by 1938 only about 10 per cent were simple
political appointees.
Seniority, of course, often plays a large part in promotions to
managerial posts in both hierarchies. The tenure of one repre-
sentative group of business bureaucrats was about 20 years; turn-
over among top executives of large corporations is typically small.
But the average tenure for bureau heads in the federal service,
as A. W. MacMahon and J. D. Millet have observed, is about 11
years. On the next level up the federal hierarchies, of course, the
Secretaries and Under-secretaries of Departments average only
from three to five years.
The upper management of U.S. business may be recruited from
among (1) insiders in the administrative hierarchy; (2) insiders
in the firm's financial or clique structure; (3) outsiders who have
proved themselves able at managing smaller firms and are thus
viewed as promising men on the management market; or (4)
younger outsiders, fresh from technical or business training, who
are usually taken in at lower levels with the expectation that
their promotion will be unencumbered and rapid.
To the extent that the last three methods of recruitment are
followed, the advancement chances of the upper middle brackets
of the cadre are diminished; thus they typically desire the first
alternative as a policy, in which they are joined by most person-
nel advisers. The upper middle brackets would further individual
security and advancement in a collective way, by fair and equal
chances' being guaranteed, which is to say by the strict bureauc-
ratization of the management field.
Symptomatic of the shift from entrepreneurship to bureau-
cratic enterprise in business is the manner of executive compen-
sation. In the world of the small entrepreneur, where owner and
manager were one, net profit was the mode of compensation. In
the white-collar worlds, the top manager is a salaried employee
receiving $25,000 to $500,000 a year. With increasing bureaucrati-
zation, annuities, pensions, and retirement plans come into the
picture and bonuses based on profit shares fade out.
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 85
In between the entrepreneurial and the bureaucratic mode of
payment there are various intermediary forms, many of them
designed to maximize incentive and to beat the federal tax. Over
the last quarter of a century taxes have become big: in 1947, for
instance, the $25,000-a-year-man took home about $17,000; the
$50,000-a-year-man about $26,000, the $150,000-a-y ear-man about
$45,000— this from salary, not counting returns from property.
Above certain levels, money as such loses incentive value; its
prestige value and the experience of success for which it is a
token gain as incentives. The more one makes the more one
needs, and if one did not continue to make money, one would
experience failure. There is no limit to the game, and there is no
way out. And its insecurities are unlimited. So heightened can
they become on the upper income levels that one management
consultant, after diligent research, has plainly stated that the
high-paid executive, like the wage-worker and salaried employee,
has security at the center of his dream-life. To the manager, ac-
cording to an Elmo Roper siu^ey, security means ( 1 ) a position
with dignity; (2) a rich and prompt recognition of accomplish-
ments; (3) a free hand to do as he wants with his job and com-
pany; and (4) plenty of leisure. These are the security contents
of the Big Money, which combine, as is appropriate in the transi-
tion era of corporate business, entrepreneurial freedom with risk-
less bureaucratic tenure.
The recruitment of a loyal managerial staff is now a major con-
cern of the larger businesses, which tend toward the develop-
ment of 'civil service' systems for single large corporations and
even for large parts of entire industries. The lag in putting such
bureaucratic procedures into effect occasions much urging from
more 'progressive' corporation officials.
The big management shortage, the consequent load of mana-
gerial work during the Second World War, and the boom led to
many formal recruitment and training plans. Selected men are
sent to courses in management at graduate schools of Business
Administration. Rotation training systems for key managerial per-
sonnel are also frequently employed: by allowing managers to
take up various tasks for scheduled brief periods of time, the sys-
tem fits them for over-all as well as delimited spheres of man-
86 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
agement. In this way the managerial cadre rationally enlarges
its opportunity for a secure chance by seeing the whole oper-
ation in detail; by definite schedules, the experience of indi-
vidual members of the cadre can be guided and the grooming of
men for advancement controlled. The management cadre itself
is being rationalized into military-like shape; in fact, some of the
very best ideas for business management have come from men of
high military experience— the 'bureaucrats' about whom business-
men complained so during the war.
Yet this increased bureaucratic training, recruitment, and pro-
motion does not extend to the very bottom or to the very top
of the business hierarchies. At the top, especially, those who run
corporations and governments are the least bureaucratic of per-
sonnel, for above a certain point 'political,' 'property,' and char-
acter' qualifications set in and determine who shapes policy for
the entire hierarchy. It is in the middle brackets of managers
that bureaucratic procedures and styles are most in evidence.
These middle managers can plan only limited spheres of work;
they transmit orders from above, executing some with their staffs
and passing on others to those below them for execution.
Although the middle management often contains the most
technically specialized men in the enterprise, their skills have
become less and less material techniques and more and more
the management of people. This is true even though super-
vision has been both intensified and diversified, and has lost
many of its tasks to newer specialists in personnel work. While
engineers take over the maintenance of the plant's new machin-
ery, the middle managers and foremen take on more 'personnel'
controls over the workers, looking more often to the personnel
ofiice than to the engineering headquarters.
The existence of middle managers indicates a further separa-
tion of worker from owner or top manager. But even as their
functions have been created, the middle managers have had their
authority stripped from them. It is lost, from the one side, as
management itself becomes rationalized and, from the other side,
as lower-management men, such as foremen, take over more spe-
cialized, less authoritative roles.
The middle managers do not count for very much in the larger
world beyond their individual bureaucracies. In so far as power
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 87
in connection with social and economic change is concerned, the
important group within the managerial strata is the top man-
agers; in so far as numbers are concerned, the important group
is the foremen, who are about half of all managers (although
less than 1 per cent of the total labor force ) . As with any 'middle'
group, what happens to the middle managers is largely dependent
upon what happens to those above and below them— to top execu-
tives and to foremen. The pace and character of work in the
middle management are coming increasingly to resemble those
in the lower ranks of the management hierarchy.
3. The Case of the Foreman
Once the foreman, representing the bottom stratum of man-
agement, was everything to the worker, the holder of his 'life
and future/ Industrial disputes often seemed disputes between
disgruntled workmen and rawhiding foremen; and yet the fore-
man's position was aspired to by the workman. The close rela-
tions, favored by the smaller plant and town, helped make for
contentment, even though the foreman held the first line of de-
fense for management. Having a monopoly on job gratification,
he often took for himself any feeling of achievement to which
his gang's labor might lead; he solved problems and overcame
obstacles for the men laboring below him. He was the master
craftsman: he knew more about the work processes than any of
the men he bossed. Before mass production, the foreman was
works manager and supervisor, production planner and personnel
executive, all in one.
He is still all of that in many small plants and in certain indus-
tries that have no technical staff and few oflBce workers. But such
plants may be seen historically as lags and their foremen as pre-
cursors of modern technical and supervisory personnel.
Of all occupational strata, in fact, none has been so grievously
affected by the rationalization of equipment and organization as
the industrial foreman. With the coming of the big industry, the
foreman's functions have been diminished from above by the
new technical and human agents and dictates of higher manage-
ment; from below, his authority has been undermined by the
growth of powerful labor unions.
88 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
Along with the host of supervisory assistants and new kinds
of superiors there has been developed in many industries semi-
automatic machinery that may require the service of highly
trained technicians, but not master craftsmen. With such machin-
ery, Hans Speier has observed, the foreman's sphere of tech-
nical competence diminishes and his skills become more those of
the personnel agent and human whip than of the master crafts-
man and work guide. As engineers and college-trained techni-
cians slowly took over, the foreman, up from the ranks, had to
learn to take orders in technical matters. In many industries the
man who could nurse semi-automatic machines, rather than boss
gangs of workmen, became the big man in the shop.
The experience originally earned and carried by the foreman
stratum is systematized, then centralized and rationally redis-
tributed. The old functions of the foreman are no longer embod-
ied in any one man's experience but in a team and in a rule book.
Each staflF innovation, of personnel specialist, safety expert, time-
study engineer, diminishes the foreman's authority and weak-
ens the respect and discipline of his subordinates. The foreman
is no longer the only link between worker and higher manage-
ment, although, in the eyes of both, he is still the most apparent
link in the elaborate hierarchy of command and technique be-
tween front oflBce and workshop.
Authority, Ernest Dale remarks, 'can now be exercised by many
foremen only in consultation with numerous other authorities,
and the resulting interrelationships are often ill-defined and dis-
turbing.' The foremen exercise authority at the point of produc
tion but they are not its final source. Often they exercise an
authority of social dominance without superior technical com-
petence. Their sharing of authority, and thus being shorn of it,
has gone far: in only 10 per cent of the companies in one sample
study do foremen have the complete right to discharge; in only
14 per cent, the absolute right to make promotions within their
departments; in only 10 per cent the complete right to discipline.
Only 20 per cent of the companies hold foremen's meetings or
practice any form of active consultation. 'The foreman,' con-
cludes the Slichter panel of the National War Labor Board, 'is
more managed than managing, more and more an executor of
other men's decisions, less and less a maker of decisions himself.'
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 89
From below, the foreman has lost authority with the men, who
are themselves often powerful in their union. Men who used to
go to their foremen with grievances now go to their union.
Foremen complain about union stewards, who frequentiy accom-
plish more for the subordinate than the foreman can. Stewards
are said by foremen to be independent: 'We are unable to make
the stewards do anything. . . They challenge even our limited
authority.' The unions can do something about the rank-and-file's
problems; in fact, the unions have in some shops got benefits for
the men once enjoyed only by foremen, including increased
security of the job. Originating typically in the working ranks,
the foreman is no longer of them, socially or politically. He may
be jealous of union picnics and parties, and he is socially isolated
from higher management.
The foreman's anxiety springs from the fact that the union
looks after the workmen; the employer is able to look after him-
self; but who will look after the foreman?
Having arisen from the ranks of labor, he often cannot expect
to go higher because he is not college-trained. By 1910 it was
being pointed out in management literature that if the manager,
in his search for dependable subordinates, turns to a 'former sub-
ordinate or fellow worker, he finds that they are attached too
much to the old regime and can't do the job well. In this dilemma,
he will turn to the technically educated young man. The em-
ployer [not technically educated] sneers at and yet respects this
man.' Today, only 21 per cent of the foremen under 40 years of
age, and 17 per cent over 40, believe they will ever get above the
foreman level. No longer belonging to labor, not 'one of the boys
in the union,' the foreman is not secure in management either,
not of it socially and educationally. 'The snobbery of executive
management is his pet peeve and the chief cause of his com-
plaining.' Foremen are older than the run-of-the-mill workers
under them; they are more often settled and have larger fam-
ilies. These facts limit their mobility and perhaps to some extent
their courage. Hans Speier has even asserted, on the basis of such
factors, that 'political opportunism' is 'the outstanding charac-
teristic of the foreman.'
During the late 'thirties and the war, standing thus in the
middle, a traflBc cop of industrial relations, with each side expect-
90 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
ing him to give its signals, the foreman became the object of
both union and management propaganda. Even though foremen
are no longer master craftsmen and work-guides as of old, they
are still seen by management as key men, not so much in their
technical roles in the work process as in their roles in the social
organization of the factory. It is in keeping with the managerial
demiurge and the changed nature of the foreman's role that he
is led into the ways of manipulation. He is to develop discipline
and loyalty among the workers by using his own personality as
the main tool of persuasion.
He must be trained as a loyal leader embodying managerially
approved opinions. 'Under present-day techniques the foreman
is chosen for his skillfulness in handling personnel— rather than
because of length-of-service or mastery of the particular opera-
tion in his charge. . . Getting along with people is 80 per cent
of the modern foreman's job.' Recruitment officers and personnel
directors are advised to consider the prospective foreman's fam-
ily and social life along with his formal education and shop
ability. The prime requisite is a rounded, well-adjusted person-
ality; foremen must 'always be the same' in their relations with
people— which means 'leaving your personal troubles at home,
and being just as approachable and amiable on a "bad day" as
on a good one.'
All manner of personal traits and behaviors are blandly sug-
gested to foremen as indispensable. 'The essential quality of
friendliness is sincerity. . . They should memorize, from the per-
sonnel records, the following about all the members of their de-
partment: first name; if married, whether husband or wife works
in the plant; approximate ages and school grades of children , . .
etc' From local newspapers 'he will learn such valuable items as:
accidents; births; deaths; children's activities; participation in
Red Cross, YMCA . . . wedding anniversaries; parties; recitals.'
'The orientation of new recruits off^ers a real opportunity to win
the friendship and loyalty of the new worker.' 'The manner of
speech of the foreman during even a minor conversation is per-
haps more important than what he says. . . Good listening
habits are a must. . . He should fine himself 10 cents for every
fall from grace. . . He needs a pleasant, clear voice [test re-
cordings are recommended]. . . The words "definitely" and
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 91
"absolutely" are taboo. . . His own prejudices must be "parked"
outside the plant.' Higher managers who cannot yet grasp the
point should recognize that such human engineering is capable
of reducing the 'hourly cost of 1.2 hours of direct labor cost
per pound of fabricated aircraft to .7 hour per pound within
an 18 month period.'
To secure the foreman's allegiance, management has show-
ered attention upon him. In return, management has written
into its rule book for foremen: 'Solidarity with his class, which
is of course the middle management group, is owed to his fel-
lows by every foreman.' 'What needs to be demonstrated is that
executive and supervisory management are one. Their interests
must not be divided and their only difference is that of function
within management.'
Realizing management's exploitation of their developing inse-
curities, younger union-conscious foremen have attempted to
rejoin the men, have tried to form unions. The unions that
began under the Wagner Act, in the 'forties, soon found them-
selves caught between the antagonism of organized labor and
the indifference of management. Probably not more than 100,000
foremen were directly committed to unions under the Wagner
Act. During the Second World War, foreman unionization took
on impetus, for foremen who had to train some 8 million green
workers began to feel their mettle and to search for a means
of asserting it. Yet out of an estimated one to one-and-a-half
million foremen in the United States, the Foreman's Association,
founded in Detroit in 1941, had at its peak only 50,000 or 5 per
cent. Even these small beginnings were beset by legal confu-
sion, and have certainly proved no solution.
4. The New Entrepreneur
Balzac called bureaucracy 'the giant power wielded by pyg-
mies,' but actually not all the men who wield bureaucratic con-
trol are appropriately so termed. Modern observers without
first-hand or sensitive experience in bureaucracies tend, first, to
infer types of bureaucrats from the ideal-type definition of bu-
reaucracy, rather than to examine the various executive adap-
tations to the enlarged enterprise and centralized bureau; and,
92 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
second, to assume that big businesses are strictly bureaucratic
in form. Such businesses are, in fact, usually mixtures, espe-
cially as regards personnel, of bureaucratic, patrimonial, and
entrepreneurial forms of organization. This means, in brief,
that politics' (as well as administration) is very much at work
in selecting and forming types of managers.
There are in the modern enterprise men who fulfil the bureau-
cratic formula; in brief, here is how they look and act:
They follow clearly defined lines of authority, each of which
is related to other lines, and all related to the understood pur-
poses of the enterprise as a going concern. Their activities and
feelings are within delimited spheres of action, set by the obli-
gations and requirements of their own 'expertese.' Their power
is neatly seated in the oflBce they occupy and derived only from
that office; all their relations within the enterprise are thus im-
personal and set by the formal hierarchical structure. Their ex-
pectations are on a thoroughly calculable basis, and are en-
forced by the going rules and explicit sanctions; their appoint-
ment is by examination, or, at least, on the basis of trained-for
competencies; and they are vocationally secure, with expected
life tenure, and a regularized promotion scheme.
Such a description is, of course, a rational caricature, although
useful as a guide to observation. There are, in fact, two sorts of
managers whose personal adaptations most closely approximate
the 'bureaucratic' type. At the top of some hierarchies, one often
notices personalities who are calm and sober and unhurried,
but who betray a lack of confidence. They are often glum men
who display a great importance of manner, seemingly have little
to do, and act with slow deliberation. They reduce the hazards
of personal decision by carefully following the rules, and are
heavily burdened by anxiety if decisions not covered by previ-
ous rule are forced upon them. They are carefully protected
from the world-to-be-impressed by subordinates and secretaries
who are working around them; they are men who have things
done for them. Liking the accoutrements of authority, they are
always in line with the aims of the employer or other higher
ups; the ends of the organization become their private ends. For
they are selected by and act for the owners or the political boss.
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 93
as safe and sound men with moderate ambitions, carefully held
within the feasible and calculable lines of the laid-out career.
That is why they are at the top and that is the point to be made
about them: they are cautiously selected to represent the formal
interest of the enterprise and its organizational integrity: they
serve that organization and, in doing so, they serve their own
personal interests. Among all the apparatus, they sit cautiously,
and after giving the appearance of weighty pondering usually
say No.
Often identical with this bureaucratic type, but usually lower
down the hierarchy of safety, are 'the old veterans.' They are
men who say they started in the business when it was small,
or in some other small business now a division of the big one.
They follow instructions, feeling insecure outside the bounds
of explicit orders, keeping out of the limelight and passing the
buck. Usually they feel a disproportion between their abilities
and their experience, and having come to feel that competition
is without yield, often become pedantic in order to get a much-
craved deference. Carefully attending to formalities with their
co-workers and with the public, they strive for additional def-
erence by obedience to rule. They sentimentalize the formal
aspects of their oflSce and feel that their personal security is
threatened by anything that would detach them from their
present setting.
But there are other types of managers who are adapted to
bureaucratic life, but who are by no means bureaucrats in the
accepted image. The bureaucratic ethos is not the only content
of managerial personalities. In particular, bureaucracies today
in America are vanguard forms of life in a culture still domi-
nated by a more entrepreneurial ethos and ideology. Among
the younger managers, two types display a blend of entrepre-
neurial and bureaucratic traits. One is the 'live-wire' who usu-
ally comes up from the sales or promotion side of the business,
and who represents a threat to those above him in the hier-
archy, especially the old veterans, although sometimes also to
the glum men. It may be that in due course the live-wire will
settle down; occasionally one does settle down, becomes some-
body's 'bright boy,' somebody else's live-wire who is then liked
94 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
and favored by those whom he serves. If his loyalty is unques-
tionable, and he is careful not to arouse anxieties by his bright-
ness, he is on the road to the top.
Some live-wires, however, do not readily become somebody's
bright boy: they become what we may call New Entrepre-
neurs, a type that deserves detailed discussion.
The dominating fact of the new business setting is the busi-
ness bureaucracy and the managerial supplementation, or even
replacement, of the owner-operator. But bureaucratization has
not completely replaced the spirit of competition. While the
agents of the new style of competition are not exactly old-fash-
ioned heroes, neither are conditions old-fashioned. Initiative is
being put to an unexampled test.
In a society so recently emerged from the small-entrepreneur
epoch, still influenced by models of success congruent with that
epoch's ideology, it is not likely that the sober-bureaucratic
type can readily become dominant. Yet the structure of the
society will not permit the traditional way of amassing personal
wealth. The nineteenth-century scene of competition was one
of relatively equal powers and the competition was between
individual businessmen or firms. The twentieth- century scene
contains huge and powerful units which compete not so much
with one another but as a totality with the consuming public
and sometimes with certain segments of the government. The
new entrepreneur represents the old go-getting competition in
the new setting.
The general milieu of this new species of entrepreneur is
those areas that are still uncertain and unroutinized. The new
entrepreneur is very much at home in the less tangible of the
'business services'— commercial research and public relations,
advertising agencies, labor relations, and the mass communica-
tion and entertainment industries. His titles are likely to be
'special assistant to the president,' 'counsel for the general man-
ager,' 'management counsellor and engineering adviser.' For
the bright, young, educated man, these fields offer limitless
opportunities, if he only has the initiative and the know-how,
and if only the anxieties of the biu-eaucratic chieftains hold up.
THE AAANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 95
The new entrepreneur may in time routinize these fields, but,
in the process of doing so, he operates in them.
The areas open to the new entrepreneur, usually overlapping
in various ways, are those of great uncertainties and new begin-
nings: (1) adjustments between various business bureaucracies,
and between business and government; (2) public relations,
the interpretative justification of the new powers to the under-
lying outsiders; and (3) new industries that have arisen in the
last quarter-century, especially those— for example, advertising
—which involve selling somewhat intangible services.
The old entrepreneur succeeded by founding a new concern
and expanding it. The bureaucrat gets a forward-looking job and
climbs up the ladder within a pre-arranged hierarchy. The new
entrepreneur makes a zig-zag pattern upward within and be-
tween established bureaucracies. In contrast to the classic small
businessman, who operated in a world opening up like a row
of oysters under steam, the new entrepreneur must operate in a
world in which all the pearls have already been grabbed up and
are carefully guarded. The only way in which he can express his
initiative is by servicing the powers that be, in the hope of get-
ting his cut. He serves them by 'fixing things,' between one big
business and another, and between business as a whole and the
public.
He gets ahead because (1) men in power do not expect that
things can be done legitimately; (2) these men know fear and
guilt; and (3) they are often personally not very bright. It is
often hard to say, with any sureness, whether the new entrepre-
neur lives on his own wits, or upon the lack of wits in others.
As for anxiety, however, it is certain that, although he may be
prodded by his own, he could get nowhere without its ample
presence in his powerful clients.
Like Balzac's des Lupeaulx, thrown up by the tide of political
events in France in the first quarter of the nineteenth century,
who had discovered that 'authority stood in need of a char-
woman,' the American new entrepreneur is an 'adroit climber
... to his professions of useful help and go-between he added
a third— he gave gratuitous advice on the internal diseases of
power. . . He bore the brunt of the first explosion of despair or
anger; he laughed and mourned with his chief. . . It was his
96 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
duty to flatter and advise, to give advice in the guise of flattery,
and flattery in the form of advice.'
The talent and intelligence that go with the new entrepreneur-
ship are often dangerous in the new society. He who has them
but lacks power must act as if those in power have the same
capacities. He must give credit for good ideas to his superiors
and take the rap himself for bad ones. The split between the
executive who judges and the intelligence that creates is sharp
and finds a ready justification: 'So I write a show? Or produce
one?' asks an account executive in one of the recent tales of un-
happiness among the new entrepreneurs. 'And I take it down to
[the] sponsor. And he asks me, in your judgment should I spend
a million dollars a year on this show you've created? See, Artie?
Actually, I'd have no judgment. I wouldn't be in a position to
criticize. In short, I wouldn't be an executive.'
As a competitor, the new entrepreneur is an agent of the bu-
reaucracy he serves, and what he competes for is the good will
and favor of those who run the system; his chance exists because
there are several bureaucracies, private and pubHc, in compli-
cated entanglements. Unlike the little white-collar man, he does
not often stay within any one corporate bureaucracy; his path
is within and between bureaucracies, in a kind of uneasy but
calculated rhythm. He makes a well-worn path between big
business and the regulatory agencies of the Federal Government,
especially its military establishment and political parties.
On the higher managerial levels there is a delicate balance of
power, security, and advancement resting upon a sensitive blend
of loyalty to one's firm and knowledge of its intimately valuable
secrets— secrets which other firms or governments would like to
know. Not 'secrets' in any hush-hush sense, although there have
been simple sell-outs, but secrets in the sense of what is inacces-
sible to those who have not operated in the context. In a bureau-
cratic world, the individual's experience is usually controlled;
the clever executive squashes entrepreneurial tendencies by using
his formal power position to monopolize contacts with important
cUents. It is a characteristic of the new entrepreneur that he
manages to gain experience without being controlled.
There are many instances of men who learn the secrets and
procedures of a regulatory agency of government to which they
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 97
are not loyal in a career sense. Their loyalties are rather to the
business hierarchy to which they intend to return. This is the
structure of one type of twentieth-century opportunity. The cur-
riculum of such 'businessmen in government' is familiar: they
have been in and out of Washington since the NIRA days, serv-
ing on advisory boards, in commerce department committees and
war production boards, retaining contact with a middle or large-
scale business enterprise. In this interlinked world, there has
been genuine opportunity for big success over the last fifteen
years.
The openings have been on all levels. On the lower levels, a
chief clerk of an OPA board may set up a business service— an
OPA buffer— for firms dealing with OPA, and slowly grow into
a management counselling service. At the center, however, opera-
tions have gone on in a big way during and after the war. Sur-
plus-property disposal, for example, became so complicated that
'the government' wasn't sure just what it was doing. The surface
has only been scratched, but evidence has been published of
millions being made from investments of thousands; of expe-
diters buying surplus tools from the government and selling
them back again; of buying from the Navy and immediately sell-
ing to the Army, et cetera. A few smaller fry have been caught;
the big fixers probably never will be, for they were only carry-
ing on business as usual during wartime and with the govern-
ment.
Perhaps the Number One figure in the short history of the new
entrepreneur has been Thomas Gardner ( 'Tommy-the-Cork' )
Corcoran, who for two terms was one of President Roosevelt's
'principal advisers and . . . trouble shooters. . . He possessed
that rare asset, either inside or outside of the Federal Govern-
ment, of knowing the whole, intricate mechanism of the Washing-
ton establishment.' A free-ranging talent scout for the administra-
tion, he was, as John H. Crider of the New York Times puts it,
'personally responsible for putting literally scores of men in key
positions throughout the Federal organization. . . He has more
pipelines into the Government than probably any other indi-
vidual on the outside. . . He always operated for the President
behind *:he scenes, having had several titles during his govern-
ment employment, including counsel . . . assistant . . . special
98 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
assistant.' Leaving the government service v^^hich paid him only
$10,000 a year, he earned as lawyer and expeditor $100,000 plus.
For the 'fixer,' who lives on the expectation that in the bureau-
cratic world things cannot be accomplished quickly through legit-
imate channels, bargaining power and sources of income consist
of intangible contacts and 'pipe-lines' rather than tangible assets.
Yet he is no less an entrepreneur in spirit and style of operation
than the man of small property; he is using his own initiative,
wile, and cunning to create something where nothing was before.
Of course, he does not have the security that property ownership
once provided; that is one thing that makes Sammy run. Yet, for
the successful, the risks are not incommensurate with the returns.
Sometimes, of course, the new entrepreneur does become a
member of the propertied rich. He can scatter his property in
various stocks in a sensible attempt to spread risks and concen-
trate chances of success. If he does not invest capital, his success
is all the greater measure of his inherent worth, for this means
that he is genuinely creative. Like the more heroic businessmen
of old, he manages to get something for very little or nothing.
And like them, he is a man who never misses a bet.
The power of the old captain of industry purportedly rested
upon his engineering ability and his financial sharp dealing. The
power of the ideal bureaucrat is derived from the authority
vested in the office he occupies. The power of the managerial
chieftain rests upon his control of the wealth piled up by the old
captain and is increased by a rational system of guaranteed
tributes. The power of the new entrepreneur, in the first instance
at least, rests upon his personality and upon his skill in using it
to manipulate the anxieties of the chieftain. The concentration
of power has thus modified the character and the larger meaning
of competition. The new entrepreneur's success or failure is de-
cided not so much by the 'supply and demand' of the impersonal
market as by the personal anxieties and decisions of intimately
known chieftains of monopoly.
The careers of both the new entrepreneur and the ordinary
white-collar worker are administered by powerful others. But
tl.ere is this difference: the toadying of the white-collar employee
is small-scale and unimaginative; he is a member of the stable
corps of the bureaucracy, and initiative is regimented out of his
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 99
life. The new ulcered entrepreneur operates on the guileful edges
of the several bureaucracies.
With his lavish expense account, the new entrepreneur some-
times gets into the public eye as a fixer— along with the respec-
table businessman whose work he does— or even as an upstart
and a crook: for the same public that idolizes initiative becomes
incensed when it finds a grand model of success based simply
and purely upon it. For one Murray Garsson caught how many
others were there? The Garssons ran a letterhead corporation
title into a profit of 78 million dollars out of war contracts,
and the same public that honors pluck and success and the
Horatio Alger story became angry. In an expanding system,
profits seem to coincide with the welfare of all; in a system
already closed, profits are made by doing somebody in. The line
between the legitimate and the illegitimate is diSicult to draw
because no one has set up the rules for the new situation. More-
over, such moral questions are decisively influenced by the size
of the business and the firmness and reliability of contacts.
Part of the new entrepreneur's frenzy perhaps is due to appre-
hension that his function may disappear. Many of the jobs he
has been doing for the chieftains are now a standardized part
of business enterprise, no longer requiring the entrepreneurial
flair, and can be handled by cheaper and more dependable white-
collar men. Increasingly, big firms hire their own talent for those
fields in which the new entrepreneurs pioneered. In so far as this
is so, the new entrepreneurs become bright boys and, as salaried
employees, are stable members of the managerial cadre.
In the more strictly bureaucratic setting, the value of contacts
a given manager has and the secrets he learns are definitely les-
sened. Rationalization of the managerial hierarchy decreases the
chance for any one man down the line to get a view of the whole.
It is the Tommy Corcoran without a definite bureaucratic role
who learns the whole, and serves his chief— and in due course
himself— by telling selected others about it. In the General Somer-
vell type of managership, the executive's control section monopo-
lizes the chance to see things whole, and tells what it will once
each month to all executives.
100 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
Rationalization prohibits a total view: by rationalizing the
organization via rotation systems and control sections, top bu-
reaucrats can guide the vision of underlings. The 'entrepreneurial
type' who does not play ball can be excluded from inside infor-
mation. Like the commodity market before it, the top level of
the personality market may well become an object to be adminis-
tered, rather than a play of free forces of crafty wile and unex-
ampled initiative.
5. The Power of the Managers
There is no doubt that managers of big business have replaced
captains of industry as the ostensibly central figures in modern
capitalism. They are the economic elite of the new society; they
are the men who have the most of whatever there is to have;
the men in charge of things and of other men, who make the
large-scale plans. They are the high bosses, the big money, the
great say-so. But, in fact, the 'top' of modem business is compli-
cated: alongside top corporation executives are scattered throngs
of owners and, below them, the upper hierarchies of managerial
employees.
As modern businesses have become larger, the ownership of
any given enterprise has expanded and the power of 'the owners'
in direct operation has declined.* The power of property within
plant, firm, and political economy has often become indirect,
and works through a host of new agents. The owners of property
do not themselves give commands to their workmen: there are
too many workmen and not enough concentrated owners. More-
over, even if personal command were technically possible, it is
more convenient to hire others for this purpose. Adam Smith,
writing even before the 'proprietor's liability' was limited, as-
serted: 'The greater part of the proprietors seldom pretend to
understand anything of the business of the company . . . give
themselves no trouble about it, but received contentedly each
* Owners are people who legally claim a share of profits and expect
that those who operate the enterprise will act for their best interests.
Managers are people who have operating control over the enterprise,
the ones who run it.
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 101
half-yearly or yearly dividend as the directors think proper to
make them.'
The facts of the split of manager and owner, and the indirect
power of the owner, have long been known. Such facts, however,
since at least the beginning of this century, have been widely
and erroneously taken to mean that 'a managerial revolution' has
been and is under way and that big management, replacing big
property, is slated to be the next ruling class.
While owner and manager are no longer the same person, the
manager has not expropriated the owner, nor has the power of
the propertied enterprise over workers and markets declined.
Power has not been split from property; rather the power of
property is more concentrated than is its ownership. If this seems
undemocratic, the lack of democracy is within the propertied
classes. If the Van Sweringen brothers controlled 8 railroads
worth $2 billion with only $20 million, still there was the $20
million, and the power they exercised was power made possible
by the $2 billion.
The powers of property ownership are depersonalized, inter-
mediate, and concealed. But they have not been minimized nor
have they declined. Much less has any revolution occurred,
managerial or otherwise, involving the legitimations of the insti-
tution of private property. Under the owners of property a huge
and complex bureaucracy of business and industry has come into
existence. But the right to this chain of command, the legitimate
access to the position of authority from which these bureauc-
racies are directed, is the right of property ownership. The stock-
holder is neither willing nor able to exercise operating control
of his ownership. That is true. And the power of the managers
is not dependent upon their own personal ownership. That is also
true. But it cannot be concluded that there is no functional rela-
tion between ownership and control of large corporations. Such
an inference focuses upon personnel issues instead of legitima-
tions and institutions.
Property as a going concern means that the owner may, if
necessary, employ violent coercion against those who do not own
but would use. With legal ownership, one may borrow the police
force to oust and to punish anyone, including former owners and
all their managers as well as non-owners, who tries to seize con-
102 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
trol of property. Even if it were true that the power of 'the
owners' had been expropriated by the managers, this would not
mean that their property has been expropriated. Any owner
who can prove any case of 'expropriation' of property by any
manager can have the managers prosecuted and put in jail.
Such changes in the distribution of power as have occurred
between owners and their managers have certainly neither de-
stroyed the propertied class nor diminished its power. All the
structural changes upon which the notion of 'a managerial revo-
lution' presumably rests are more accurately understood (1) as
a modification of the distribution of operating power within the
propertied class as a whole; and (2) as a general bureaucratiza-
tion of property relations.
Changes have occurred within the industrial propertied class
in such a way that the actual wielding of power is delegated to
hierarchies; the entrepreneurial function has been bureaucra-
tized. But the top man in the bureaucracy is a powerful member
of the propertied class. He derives his right to act from the insti-
tution of property; he does act in so far as he possibly can in a
manner he believes is to the interests of the private-property
system; he does feel in unity, politically and status-wise as well
as economically, with his class and its source of wealth.
Observers who are shocked by recognition of the fact that the
immediate power which property gives may be delegated or,
under certain circumstances, usurped by higher employees and
cliques of minority owoiers, often overlook the source of power
and the meaning of property, while looking at the huge and in-
tricate form of bureaucratic big business. The division between
'ownership' and 'control' of property does not diminish the power
of property: on the contrary, it may even increase it. It does, how-
ever, change the personnel, the apparatus, and the property status
of the more immediate wielders of that power.
If the powerful officials of U.S. corporations do not act as old-
fashioned owners within the plants and do not derive their power
from personal owoiership, their power is nevertheless contingent
upon their control of property. They are managers of private
properties, and if private property were 'abolished,' their power,
if any, would rest upon some other basis, and they would have
to look to other sources of authority. Many of these same men
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 103
might continue as managers of factories and mines, but that is
a new pohtical question.
To say that managers are managers of private property means,
first, that the principles they attempt to follow are not the budg-
etary considerations of those who manage public property, but
rather that they use their power in the interest of maximizing
profits. Secondly, it means that property institutions determine
whom the managers are responsible to; 'they are responsible to
the eflFective clique of owners,' conclude TNEC economists, and
to the large property class in general.' Managers have not been
known to act intentionally against the property interests of the
large owners. Their actions are in the interests of property as
they see them. This is the case whether they act in relation to the
workman in the plant, toward competing firms, toward the gov-
ernment, or toward the consumers of their company's product.
Of course many men who own stocks and bonds and other
promises do now own enough productive facilities to make a
difference in the distribution of power. But this only means that
the managers are agents of big property owTiers and not of
small ones. Managers of corporations are the agents of those
owners who own the concentrated most; they derive such power
as they have from the organizations which are based upon prop-
erty as a going system.
'The Managers' are often thought of as scientific technolo-
gists or administrative experts having some autonomous aim.
But they are not experts in charge of technology; they are
executors of property. Their chief attention is to finance and
profits, which are the major interests of owners. The managers
who are supposed to have usurped the owners' function actu-
ally fulfil it with as much or more devotion as any owner could.
The personal relations between big owners and their big man-
agers are of course not necessarily 'authoritative,' except in so
far as the owners and their boards of directors are interested
in the profitable balance sheet, and accordingly judge their
managers as, in fact, the managers judge themselves. External
authority is not necessary when the agent has internalized it.
That the activities of the manager of industry and finance are
in line with property interests, rather than with 'independent'
aims, is revealed by the motives for the merging and building
104 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
up of huge businesses. By the end of the nineteenth century,
industrial consolidation in the United States had in many lines
gone far enough to realize the major technical advantages of
large-scale production. The pre- World War I trust movement
was not primarily motivated by a desire for technical eflBciency,
but by 'financial and strategic advantages.' Creating size in
business has often permitted the manipulation of funds and
power by business insiders and financial outsiders for their own
enrichment— and, of course, the suppression of competition and
the gaining of promotional and underwriting profits. The kind
of combinations of functions in industry which increases pro-
ductivity occurs primarily within a physical plant, rather than
between various plants.
The question is whether or not the managers fulfil the entre-
preneurial function in such a way as to modify the way in which
the owners would fulfil it. But how could they do so, when the
institution of private property, the power of property, and the
function of the entrepreneur remain? The manager, as Edwin
Nourse observes, is still rated 'on evidence of the profitableness
of the company's operations while under his management. . .'
It is true that managers do not personally own the property they
manage. But we may not jump from this fact to the assertion that
they are not personally of the propertied class. On the contrary,
compared to the population at large, they definitely form a seg-
ment of the small, much-propertied circle. At least two-thirds of
the $75,000 a year and up incomes of corporation managers are
derived from property holdings. Top-level managers ( presumably
the most 'powerful' ) are socially and politically in tune with other
large property holders. Their image of ascent involves moving
further into the big propertied circles. The old road to property
was starting a firm and building it up, rising in class position
with its expansion; that road is now closed to nearly all. The way
into propertied circles, via management posts and/or suitable
marriages, is more likely to be within the large propeftied bu-
reaucracies.
Intercorporate investments and multiple directorships among
'managers' give further unity to the propertied classes as a
stratum. The handful of officers and directors of the AT&T
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 105
who hold 171 directorships or offices in other enterprises are not
simply holding 'honorary degrees'; where the corporations whose
directors interlock also have interlocking business, these men pay
attention; in such ways a community of property interest, a reso-
lution of sharp competitive conflicts, can arise. Consolidations
have given further 'unity to the ownership, but not to the pro-
ductive processes of subsidiary plants.' The aim has been further
monopoly of national markets and the profitable consolidation
of property.
The image of the big businessman as master-builder and profit-
maker, as already noted of the old captain of industry, no longer
holds. The top manager's relation to productive work and engi-
neering is a financial one. His relations with the industrial man-
ager, in terms of power, are not unlike those of the politician
with the government official, or the elected labor leader with his
appointed staff expert. The corporation official has the final say-so;
for in the bureaucratization of the powers of property, he rep-
resents the big money and in his relations with major owners is
treated as a status equal, belonging to their clubs, and acting in
their behalf.
In the political sphere, no American manager has taken a
stand that is against the interests of private property as an insti-
tution. As its chief defender, rhetorically and practically, the
manager has a political mind similar to that of any large owner,
from whom he derives his power; and in his present form he will
last no longer than property as an institution. Thus, although
the bureaucratization of property involves a distribution of
power among large subordinate staffs, the executives of the mod-
ern corporation in America form an utterly reliable committee
for managing the affairs and pushing for the common interests of
the entire big-property class.
So far as men may do as they will with the property that they
own or that they manage for owners, they have power over other
men. Changes in the size and the distribution of property have
brought with them an increased power for some and a corres-
ponding powerlessness for many. The shift is from widespread
entrepreneurial property to narrowed class property. The owner-
ship of property now means much more than power over the
106 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
things that are owned; it means power over men who do not own
these things; it selects those who may command and those who
must obey.
6. Three Trends
The managerial demiurge has come to contain three trends
which increasingly give it meaning and shape. As it spreads (i),
its higher functions, as well as those lower in the hierarchy, are
rationalized; as this occurs (ii), the enterprise and the bureau
become fetishes, and (in), the forms of power that are wielded,
all up and down the line, shift from explicit authority to manipu-
lation.
I. The rationalization of the corporate structure, even at the
top, may not be lodged in the head of a single living man, but
buried in an accounting system served by dozens of managers,
clerks, and specialists, no one of whom knows what it is all about
or what it may mean. The man who started the enterprise, if
there ever was such a man, may long be gone. Franz Kafka has
written of '. . . a peculiar characteristic of our administrative
apparatus. Along with its precision it's extremely sensitive as
well . . . suddenly in a flash the decision comes in some unfore-
seen place, that moreover, can't be found any longer later on, a
decision that settles the matter, if in most cases justly, yet all the
same, arbitrarily. It's as if the administrative apparatus were un-
able any longer to bear the tension, the year-long irritation
caused by the same affair— probably trivial in itself— and had hit
upon the decision by itself, without the assistance of the officials.
Of course, a miracle didn't happen and certainly it was some
clerk who hit upon the solution or the unwritten decision, but in
any case it couldn't be discovered by us at least, by us here, or
even by the Head Bureau, which clerk had decided in this case
and on what grounds . . . we will never learn it; besides by this
time it would scarcely interest anybody.'
It seems increasingly that all managers are 'middle' managers,
who are not organized in such a manner as to allow them to as-
sume collective responsibility. They form, as Edmund Wilson
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 107
has observed of 'capitalistic society in America,' 'a vast system
for passing the buck.'
In trade, the department manager, floorman, and salesperson
replace the merchant; in industry, the plant engineers and staffs
of foremen replace the manufacturing proprietor; and in prac-
tically all brackets of the economy, middle managers become the
routinized general staff without final responsibility and decision.
Social and technical divisions of labor among executives cut the
nerve of independent initiative. As decisions are split and shared
and as the whole function of management expands, the filing
case and its attendants come between the decision maker and
his means of execution.
An 'inventory control' is set up for the management cadre and,
as the U.S. Naval Institute has it, there is a 'detailed man-by-
man analysis of all the people in a company who hold super-
visory jobs'; classifying each man as 'promotable, satisfactory,
unsatisfactory' on the basis of interviews 'with him, his superior,
and his subordinates and perhaps some scientific testing'; work-
ing out a concrete time-schedule 'for each promotable man' and
another 'for getting rid of the deadwood.' Since top managers
cannot serve the market properly and at the same time manage
their 'giant bureaucracy,' they rationalize the top, divide them-
selves into Boards, Commissions, Authorities, Committees, De-
partments; the organization expert thus becomes a key person
in the managerial cadre, as it shifts from the open occupational
market to managed selection and control. This administrative
official, a sort of manager of managers, as well as of other per-
sonnel, is in turn rationalized and acquires a staff of industrial
psychologists and researchers into human relations, whose do-
main includes personal traits and mannerisms, as well as techni-
cal skills. These officials and technicians embody the true mean-
ing of the 'personal equation' in the mass life of modern organi-
zation: the rationalization of all its higher functions.
II. In the managerial demiurge, the capitalist spirit itself has
been bureaucratized and the enterprise fetishized. 'There is,'
Henry Ford said, 'something sacred about a big business.' 'The
object of the businessman's work,' Walter Rathenau wrote in
1908, 'of his worries, his pride and his aspirations is just his enter-
108 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
prise . . . the enterprise seems to take on form and substance,
and to be ever with him, having, as it were, by virtue of his
bookkeeping, his organization, and his branches, an independent
economic existence. The businessman is wholly devoted to mak-
ing his business a flourishing, healthy, living organism.' This is
the inner, fetish-like meaning of his activity.
The giant enterprise, Werner Sombart has shown, impersonally
takes unto itself those sober virtues that in earlier phases of
capitalism were personally cultivated by the entrepreneur. Thrift,
frugality, honesty have ceased to be necessary to the managerial
entrepreneur. Once these virtues were in the sphere wherein per-
sonal will-power was exercised; now they have become part of
the mechanism of business; they 'have been transferred to the
business concern.' They were 'characteristics of human beings';
now they are 'objective principles of business methods.' When
'the industrious tradesman went through his day's work in con-
scious self-mastery' it was necessary 'to implant a solid foundation
of duties' in the consciousness of men. But now 'the businessman
works at high pressure because the stress of economic activities
carries him along in spite of himself.' When the private and
business 'housekeeping' of the entrepreneur were identical, fru-
gality was needed, but now the housekeeping is rigidly sep-
arated, and the frugal enterprise makes possible the lavish cor-
porate manager, if he wants to be lavish. And so, 'the conduct
of the entrepreneur as a man may differ widely from his conduct
as a tradesman.' The name of the firm is all that matters, and
this name does not rest upon the personal quality of the entre-
preneurial flair of its head; it rests upon business routine and the
careful administration of appropriate publicity.
No matter what the motives of individual owners and manag-
ers, clerks, and workers, may be, the Enterprise itself comes in
time to seem autonomous, with a motive of its own: to manipu-
late the world in order to make a profit. But this motive is em-
bodied in the rationalized enterprise, which is out for the secure
and steady return rather than the deal with chance.
Just as the working man no longer owns the machine but is
controlled by it, so the middle-class man no longer owns the
enterprise but is controlled by it. The vices as well as the virtues
of the old entrepreneur have been 'transferred to the business
THE AAANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 109
concern.' The aggressive business types, seen by Herman Mel-
ville as greedy, crooked creatures on the edges of an expanding
nineteenth-century society are replaced in twentieth-century so-
ciety by white-collar managers and clerks who may be neither
greedy nor aggressive as persons, but who man the machines that
often operate in a 'greedy and aggressive' manner. The men are
cogs in a business machinery that has routinized greed and made
aggression an impersonal principle of organization.
The bureaucratic enterprise itself sets the pace of decision and
obedience for the business and governmental ofiBcialdom and the
world of clerks and bookkeepers, even as the motions of the
worker are geared to the jump of the machine and the command
of the foreman. Since the aims of each of its activities must be
related to master purposes within it, the purposes of the enter-
prise in time become men's motives, and vice versa. The manner
of their action, held within rules, is the manner of the enterprise.
Since their authority inheres not in their persons, but in its
offices, their authority belongs to the enterprise. Their status,
and hence their relations to others in the hierarchy, inhere in
the titles on their doors: the enterprise with its Board of Di-
rectors is the source of all honor and authority. Their safety
from those above and their authority over those below derive
from its rules and regulations. In due course, their very self-
images, what they do and what they are, are derived from the
enterprise. They know some of its secrets, although not all of
them, and their career proceeds according to its rule and within
its graded channels. Only within those rules are they supposed,
impersonally, to compete with others.
III. Coercion, the ultimate type of power, involves the use of
physical force by the power-holder; those who cannot be other-
wise influenced are handled physically or in some way used
against their will. Authority involves the more or less voluntary
obedience of the less powerful; the problem of authority is to
find out who obeys whom, when, and for what reasons. Manipu-
lation is a secret or impersonal exercise of power; the one who
is influenced is not explicitly told what to do but is nevertheless
subject to the will of another.
no WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
In modem society, coercion, monopolized by the democratic
state, is rarely needed in any continuous way. But those who
hold power have often come to exercise it in hidden ways: they
have moved and they are moving from authority to manipula-
tion. Not only the great bureaucratic structures of modern soci-
ety, themselves means of manipulation as well as authority, but
also the means of mass communication are involved in the shift.
The managerial demiurge extends to opinion and emotion and
even to the mood and atmosphere of given acts.
Under the system of explicit authority, in the round, solid
nineteenth century, the victim knew he was being victimized,
the misery and discontent of the powerless were explicit. In the
amorphous twentieth-century world, where manipulation re-
places authority, the victim does not recognize his status. The
formal aim, implemented by the latest psychological equipment,
is to have men internalize what the managerial cadres would
have them do, without their knowing their own motives, but
nevertheless having them. Many whips are inside men, who do
not know how they got there, or indeed that they are there.
In the movement from authority to manipulation, power shifts
from the visible to the invisible, from the known to the anony-
mous. And with rising material standards, exploitation becomes
less material and more psychological.
No longer can the problem of power be set forth as the simple
one of changing the processes of coercion into those of consent.
The engineering of consent to authority has moved into the realm
of manipulation where the powerful are anonymous. Impersonal
manipulation is more insidious than coercion precisely because
it is hidden; one cannot locate the enemy and declare war upon
him. Targets for aggression are unavailable, and certainty is taken
from men.
In a world dominated by a vast system of abstractions, man-
agers may become cold with principle and do what local and
immediate masters of men could never do. Their social insulation
results in deadened feelings in the face of the impoverishment
of life in the lower orders and its stultification in the upper
circles. We do not mean merely that there are managers of bu-
reaucracies and of communication agencies who scheme (al-
though, in fact, there are, and their explicit ideology is one of
THE MANAGERIAL DEMIURGE 111
manipulation ) ; but more, we mean that the social control of the
system is such that irresponsibility is organized into it.
Organized irresponsibility, in this impersonal sense, is a lead-
ing characteristic of modern industrial societies everywhere. On
every hand the individual is confronted with seemingly remote
organizations; he feels dwarfed and helpless before the mana-
gerial cadres and their manipulated and manipulative minions.
That the power of property has been bureaucratized in the
corporation does not diminish that power; indeed, bureaucracy
increases the use and the protection of property power. The state
purportedly contains a balance of power, but one must examine
the recruitment of its leading personnel, and above all the actual
effects of its policies on various classes, in order to understand
the source of the power it wields.
Bureaucracies not only rest upon classes, they organize the
power struggle of classes. Within the business firm, personnel ad-
ministration regulates the terms of employment, just as would
the labor union, should a union exist: these bureaucracies fight
over who works at what and for how much. Their fight is in-
creasingly picked up by governmental bureaus. More generally,
government manages whole class levels by taxation, price, and
wage control, administrating who gets what, when, and how.
Rather than the traditional inheritance of son from father, or the
free liberal choice of occupation on an open market, educational
institutions and vocational guidance experts would train and fit
individuals of various abilities and class levels into the levels of
the pre-existing hierarchies. Within the firm, again, and as part
of the bureaucratic management of mass democracy, the graded
hierarchy fragments class situations, just as minute gradations
replace more homogeneous masses at the base of the pyramids.
The traditional and often patriarchal ties of the old enterprise
are replaced by rational and planned linkages in the new, and
the rational systems hide their power so that no one sees their
sources of authority or understands their calculations. For the
bureaucracy, Marx wrote in 1842, the world is an object to be
manipulated.
6
Old Professions and New Skills
The professional strata are the seat of such intellectual powers
as are used for income in the United States, In and around these
occupations, which require specialized, systematic, and often
lengthy training, the highest skills of the arts and sciences are
socially organized and applied. They most clearly exemplify the
rationalist ethos that has been held to be the characteristic mark
and the essential glory of western civilization itself. So any
changes in their social basis and composition would, in one way
or another, be reflected in western society's level of technique,
art, and intellectual sensibility.
In no sphere of twentieth-century society has the shift from
the old to the new middle-class condition been so apparent, and
its ramification so wide and deep, as in the professions. Most
professionals are now salaried employees; much professional
work has become divided and standardized and fitted into the
new hierarchical organizations of educated skill and service; in-
tensive and narrow specialization has replaced self-cultivation
and wide knowledge; assistants and sub-professionals perform
routine, although often intricate, tasks, while successful profes-
sional men become more and more the managerial type. So de-
cisive have such shifts been, in some areas, that it is as if ration-
ality itself had been expropriated from the individual and been
located, as a new form of brain power, in the ingenious bureauc-
racy itself.
Yet, the old professional middle class strongly persists. While
many salaried professionals exemplify most sharply the bureau-
112
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 113
cratic manner of existence, many other professionals who remain
free, especially in medicine and law, have in a curious way be-
come a new seat of private-enterprise practice.
These two coexisting themes— of bureaucracy and of commer-
cialization—guide our understanding of the U.S. professional
world today.
1. The Professions and Bureaucracy
Most of the old professionals have long been free practitioners;
most of the new ones have from their beginnings been salaried
employees. But the old professions, such as medicine and law,
have also been invaded by the managerial demiurge and sur-
rounded by sub-professionals and assistants. The old practition-
er's oflBce is thus supplanted by the medical clinic and the law
factory, while newer professions and skills, such as engineering
and advertising, are directly involved in the new social organiza-
tions of salaried brain power.
Free professionals of the old middle class have not been so
much replaced in the new society as surrounded and supple-
mented by the new groups. In fact, over the last two generations,
free practitioners have remained a relatively constant propor-
tion (about 1 per cent) of the labor force as a whole, and about
2 per cent of the middle class as a whole. In the meantime,
however, salaried professionals have expanded from 1 to 6 per
cent of all the people at work, and from about 4 to 14 per cent
of the middle class. The expansion of the professional strata has
definitely been an expansion of its new middle-class wing. Even
in the old middle-class world of 1870, salaried professionals
( mainly nurses and schoolteachers ) made up a dominant section
of the professional strata; only 35 per cent were free profes-
sionals. By 1940, however, only 16 per cent were.
The proliferation of new professional skills has been a result
of the technological revolution and the involvement of science
in wider areas of economic life; it has been a result of the demand
for specialists to handle the complicated institutional machinery
developed to cope with the complication of the technical envi-
ronment. The new professional skills that have grown up thus
center on the one hand around the machineries of business ad-
114 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
ministration and the mass media of communication, manipula-
tion, and entertainment; and on the other hand, around the in-
dustrial process, the engineering firm, and the scientific labora-
tory. On both the technical and the human side, the rise of TV,
the motion picture, radio, mass-circulation magazine, and of
research organizations that marshal facts about every nook and
cranny of the social and technical organism has caused the rise
of many new professions and many more sub-professions.
The old professional middle class never needed to possess prop-
erty, but whether its members owned their means of livelihood
or not, their working unit has been small and personally man-
ageable, and their working lives have involved a high degree of
independence in day-to-day decisions. They themselves set their
fees or other remuneration, regulate their own hours and condi-
tions of work according to market conditions and personal incli-
nations.
As the old professions and the new skills have become in-
volved in new middle-class conditions, professional men and
women have become dependent upon the new technical machin-
ery and up"on the great institutions within whose routines the
machines are located. They work in some department, under
some kind of manager; while their salaries are often high, they
are salaries, and the conditions of their work are laid down by
rule. What they work on is determined by others, even as they
determine how a host of sub-professional assistants will work.
Thus they themselves become part of the managerial demiurge.
As professional people of both old and new middle classes be-
come attached to institutions, they acquire staffs of assistants,
who, in contrast to the old professional apprentices, are not
necessarily or even usually in training to become autonomous
professionals themselves. Thus physicians hand over some of their
work to trained nurses, laboratory technicians, physical thera-
pists. Ministers lose, sometimes willingly and sometimes not, sev-
eral of their old functions to social workers and psychiatric wel-
fare workers and teachers. Law partners give their less challeng-
ing tasks to clerks and salaried associates. Individual scholars
in the universities become directors of research, with staffs doing
specialized functions, while the remaining individual scholar
takes over some of the awe and receptiveness toward the expert
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 115
who manages his specialized and narrow domain. Alongside the
graduate student apprentice there is now the research techni-
cian, who may have no thought of becoming an individual
scholar; take her away from the machine and the organization
and she ceases to work. Between the individual composer of
music and his audience there is the big symphony orchestra, the
radio-chain, the proprietors of the art world who manage the in-
creasingly expensive means of execution and display. In prac-
tically every profession, the managerial demiurge works to build
ingenious bureaucracies of intellectual skills.
Bureaucratic institutions invade all professions and many pro-
fessionals now operate as part of the managerial demiurge. But
this does not mean that professionals are no longer entrepre-
neurs. In fact, many among the new skill groups resemble new
entrepreneurs more than bureaucratic managers, and many who
work in the old free professions are still free practitioners. The
bureaucratic manner has not replaced the entrepreneurial; rather
the professional strata today represent various combinations of
the two: at the bottom extreme, the staflFs of lesser-skilled, newer
members of the strata begin and remain bureaucratized; at the
top, the free and the salaried professionals make their own curi-
ous adaptation to the new conditions prevailing in their work,
2. The Medical World
The white-collar world of medicine is still presided over by
the physician as entrepreneur, and, as L. W, Jones has observed,
'his ideology remains dominant,' Yet the self-sufficiency of the
entrepreneurial physician has been undermined in all but its eco-
nomic and ideological aspects by his dependence, on the one
hand, upon technical equipment that is formally centralized,
and, on the other, upon informal organizations that secure and
maintain his practice.
Medical technology has of necessity been centralized in hos-
pital and clinic; the private practitioner must depend upon ex-
pensive equipment as well as upon specialists and technicians
for diagnosis and treatment. He must also depend upon relations
with other doctors, variously located in the medical hierarchy, to
get started in practice and to keep up his clientele. For as medi-
116 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
cine has become technically specialized, some way of getting
those who are ill in contact with those who can help them is
needed. In the absence of a formal means of referral, informal
cliques of doctors, in and out of hospitals, have come to perform
this function.
Tendencies toward bureaucratization in the world of medicine
have expressed themselves in expansive and devious ways, but
there is already something to be said for the idea that today the
old general practitioner is either an old-fashioned family doctor
in a small city, or a young doctor who has not yet got the money,
skill, or connections for specializing successfully. The glorifica-
tion of the old country doctor in the mass media suggests a nos-
talgic mood. This type, as well as all types of individual general
practitioner, has been left behind by the progress of scientific
medicine, in which the specialist also remains an entrepreneur
in an institutional context he hasn't learned to accept and which
he exploits economically.
The centralization in medicine does not concern individual
partnerships or 'group practice' among physicians, but rather
hospitals, to which there is a definite shift as the center of medi-
cal practice. Physicians and surgeons, who now comprise only
one-fifth of medical and health workers, have come to represent
a new sort of entrepreneur. For they are attached, as privileged
entrepreneurs, to the otherwise bureaucratic hospital. Below the
physician the shift to salaried positions of lesser skill is very
marked; the sub-professions in medicine are attached to the in-
stitution.
The hospital, as Bemhard Stern and others have made clear, is
now 'the strategic factor' in medical care and education; scientific
and technological developments are making it more so. Here the
specialists have access to the funded equipment for diagnosis
and experiment and to contacts with other specialists, so impor-
tant for scientific advancement and learning. Economically, the
coming of the hospital into a focal position has 'increased the
medical bill of the population and put adequate medical care,
as now organized, beyond the reach of the low income groups.'
The old general practitioner, whom scientific advances and
team-work in hospital and clinic have made technologically obso-
lete, fights the hospital as any old middle-class entrepreneur
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 117
fights large-scale technical superiority. The new specialist, if he
is 'in,' exploits his position economically, or, if he is 'out,' often
has a trained incapacity to practice general medicine.
In the medical world as a whole an increased proportion of
physicians are specialists who enjoy greater prestige and income
than the general practitioner and are necessarily relied upon by
him. These specialists are concentrated in the cities and tend to
work among the wealthy classes, making about twice as much
money as general practitioners. They form, in most cities, what
Oswald Hall has aptly called 'the inner fraternity' of the medical
profession and, as Professor Hall has indicated, they control
appointments to medical institutions, discipline intruders, dis-
tribute patients among themselves and other doctors— in short,
seek to control competition and the medical career at each of
its stages. They form a tightly organized in-group, with a tech-
nical division of labor and a firmly instituted way of organizing
the sick market. As young doctors see the way the pyramid
is shaped, they tend to bypass the experience of the old general
practitioner altogether.
But specialized or not, the proportion of physicians has nar-
rowed, while that of all other medical personnel has expanded;
and all medical personnel other than doctors tend to become
salaried employees of one sort or another, whereas most physi-
cians are still independent practitioners. The proportionately
narrowed stratum of physicians has, in fact, been made possible
precisely by the enormous increase of specialized and general
assistants. In 1900 there were 11 physicians to every 1 graduate
nurse; in 1940 there were 2 graduate nurses for every physi-
cian. Above the general practitioner is the specialist, informally
organized with reference to the inner fraternity; below him are
the increasing number of assistants and sub-professionals, at the
first call of the inner fraternity and usually attached to the
hospital.
The nurse is most curiously involved in this complicated insti-
tution. Most 'training schools' are owned and operated by hos-
pitals; 'in return for classroom education, apprenticeship training
in hospital, room, board, laundry, and free medical attention, the
student nurse is expected to give her services willingly to the
hospital; in many of these hospital schools, it has been asserted.
118 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
most recently by Eli Ginzberg, director of the New York State
Hospital Study, the primary purpose is not so much 'education'
as simply a means of getting cheap labor, for they find it less
expensive to train students than to hire graduate nurses.
The persistence of its independent practitioners is one of the
most decisive facts about the medical world today. Of all pro-
fessions, those of physicians, surgeons, osteopaths, and dentists
contain the highest proportion of independent practitioners: from
80 to 90 per cent. They are still a scatter of individual practices,
but they are clustered around the large-scale institutional devel-
opments. Only 46 per cent of the pharmacists and only 8 per
cent of the nurses— the largest single group in medicine— are free
practitioners, and the many fledgling sub-professionals and tech-
nicians of medicine are without notable exception in salaried
positions. The sub-professions and assistants are concentrated
in institutional centers, which the physicians use— as individual
practitioners.
A hospital is a bureaucracy with many traditional hangovers
from its less bureaucratic past; it is a bureaucracy that trains
many of its own staff and, while it may set some free again, they
still depend upon it. As hospitals replace the doctor's oflBce as
the center of the medical world, the young doctor himself is no
longer apprenticed to another physician, as was the case up to
the 1840's, but becomes an intern, an apprentice to the institu-
tion of the hospital. Later, as a private practitioner, if he is for-
tunate, he uses its facilities for his patients. Moreover, through-
out his career, his appointments to hospital posts are crucial to
his medical practice. 'The more important hospital posts,' Oswald
Hall has concluded, 'are associated with the highly specialized
practices and usually with the most lucrative types. The two
form an interrelated system.' This system narrows the general
practitioner's market and implies (correctly) that he is incom-
petent to handle many types of illness.
The large-scale medical institution, with its specialization and
salaried staff, is controlled by an inner corps of physicians co-
operating with one another as entrepreneurs. In this situation, a
selection of those with managerial abilities, who are in with the
clique, undoubtedly goes on. Who becomes the hospital head,
the clinic chieftain, the head of a medical office of a great in-
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 119
dustry? The medical bureaucrat and the scientific laboratory-
oriented specialist, and above all, the man with entrepreneurial
talent working through medical bureaucracies, now surround the
old general practitioner who once was all these things on a small
scale. But what seems important about the specialization of medi-
cine is that it has not occurred in a strictly bureaucratic way;
these trends, as well as others, have all been limited and even
shaped by commercial motives.
The relative lack of expansion of the medical profession, de-
spite two world wars with their enormous medical demands and
a general increase in medical needs, is one of the most remark-
able facts of U.S. occupational structure. In 1900 there was 1
licensed physician for every 578 persons in the United States;
in 1940 there was 1 for every 750 persons. Moreover, not all
licensed physicians were practicing; in 1940 there was 1 active
physician to every 935 persons. This closing up of the medical
ranks has been made possible by (1) the expansion of medical
assistants and sub-professions in medical organizations, to which
the entrepreneurial physician has had access; (2) the increased
diflBculty of ascent possible through expensive educational proc-
esses; (3) the deliberate policies of the American Medical As-
sociation and the heads of some of the leading medical schools.
The AMA, the trade association of the physician as a small
businessman, represents him— to federal and state governments,
medical schools and hospital boards, as well as to the lay public.
It has great weight within the leading medical schools. Physi-
cians may differ about the public problems of medicine and
health, many individuals among them may even be confused,
but the point of view of the AMA is that of the NAM applied
to medicine in a complicated and needful world. It cries aloud
against the 'evils of regimentation' and national health bills.
While the fact, agreed to by the majority of scholars in the field,
is that 'where the need is greatest, there satisfaction is least,' the
principle expounded by the AMA is liberty for all physicians,
which, profession or no profession, means exactly what it means
for all old middle-class elements. The profession as a whole is
politically uninterested or ignorant; its members are easy victims
and ready exponents ot the U.S. businessman's psychology of
120 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
individualism, in which Hberty means no state interference, ex-
cept a rigid state licensing system.
The professional ethics in which this interest group clothes its
business drive is an obsolete mythology, but it has been of great
use to those who would adapt themselves to predatory ways, at-
tempting to close the ranks and to freeze the inequality of status
among physicians and the inequality of medical care among the
population at large. Even in the middle of the Second World
War, the dean of a leading medical school held 'the supply of
doctors adequate' and bewailed the 'alarm over the alleged
shortage . . .' of doctors.
Other occupations in medicine have followed the AMA lead.
The entrepreneurial policy of business unionism in medicine has
been implemented by the fact that medical education has be-
come increasingly expensive at a time when upward mobility
has been generally tightening up. It has been correctly charged
that there are quotas for minorities in medical schools; in addi-
tion to skin color, religion, and national origin, the quota system
rests on the class and professional status of the would-be doctor's
parents.
Once through the medical school, the young doctors face the
hospital, which they find also contains departments, hierarchies,
and grades. One hospital administrator in an eastern city told
Oswald Hall how interns are selected: 'The main qualification as
far as I can see is "personality." Now that is an intangible sort
of thing. It means partly the ability to mix well, to be humble
to older doctors in the correct degree, and to be able to assume
the proper degree of superiority toward the patient. Since all
medical schools now are Grade A there is no point in holding
competitive examinations. . . Another reason for not holding
competitive examinations for internships is that there are a lot of
Jews in medicine. Did you know that?' Another hospital ad-
ministrator said: 'There are good specialists among the older
doctors who cannot pass examinations but they deserve to be
protected in their positions in the hospitals.' After discussing
various changes that have lengthened the period of training and
prohibited the poor from working their way into medicine, this
physician spoke of the ethics of his profession: 'It means that
the specialists are selected from the old established families in
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 121
the community, and family and community bonds are pretty im-
portant in making a person abide by a code.'
The inner core that abides by this code not only controls the
key posts in the hospital, but virtually the practice of medicine
in a city, much more effectively it often seems than boilermakers
or auto-workers control the work and pay in their fields. It is with
reference to these highly co-operative enterprisers that the indi-
vidual practitioner must find his medical role and practice it.
He cannot now successfully do so as a free-lance man in an old
middle-class world, in which the talented, openly competitive,
come to the top.
3. Lawyers
Both Tocqueville, near the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury, and Bryce, near the end, thought the American lawyers'
prestige was very high; in fact, they believed lawyers, as Willard
Hurst puts it, to be a sort of ersatz aristocracy. Yet there has
always been an ambiguity about the popular image of lawyers—
they are honorable but they are also sharp. A code of profes-
sional ethics, it should be recalled, was not adopted by the
American Bar Association until 1908, and even then did not really
deal with the Bar's social responsibility.
Before the ascendancy of the large corporation, skill and elo-
quence in advocacy selected nineteenth-century leaders of the
bar; reputations and wealth were created and maintained in the
courts, of which the lawyer was an officer. He was an agent of
the law, handling the general interests of society, as fixed
and allowed in the law; his day's tasks were as varied as human
activity and experience itself. An opinion leader, a man whose
recommendations to the community counted, who handled obli-
gations and rights of intimate family and life problems, the lib-
erty and property of all who had them, the lawyer personally
pointed out the course of the law and counseled his client against
the pitfalls of illegality. Deferred to by his client, he carefully
displayed the dignity he claimed to embody. Rewarded for ap-
parent honesty, carrying an ethical halo, held to be fit material
for high statesmanship, the lawyer upheld public service and was
professionally above business motives.
122 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
But the skills and character of a profession shift, externally,
as the function of the profession changes with the nature of its
clients' interests, and internally, as the rewards of the profession
are given to new kinds of success. The function of the law has
been to shape the legal framework for the new economy of the
big corporation, with the split of ownership and control and the
increased monopoly of economic power. The framework for this
new business system has been shaped out of a legal system rooted
in the landed property of the small entrepreneur, and has been
adapted to commercial, industrial, and then investment econo-
mies. In the shift, the public has become for the lawyer what
the public has been for the lawyer's chief client— an object of
profit rather than of obligation.
There is one lawyer for approximately every 750 persons in the
United States but this lawyer does not serve equally each of these
750. In rural districts and small cities, there is one lawyer for ap-
proximately every 1200, in big cities one for every 400 or 500.
More directly, people with little or no money are largely un-
able to hire lawyers. Not persons, not unorganized publics of
small investors, propertyless workers, consumers, but a thin upper
crust and financial interests are what lawyers serve. Their in-
come, a better income today than that received by any other
professional group except doctors, comes from a very small
upper income level of the population and from institutions.
In fulfilling his function the successful lawyer has created his
office in the image of the corporations he has come to serve and
defend. Because of the increased load of the law business and
the concentration of successful practice, the law ofiice has grown
in size beyond anything dreamed of by the nineteenth-century
solicitor. Such centralization of legal talent, in order that it may
bear more closely upon the central functions of the law, means
that many individual practitioners are kept on the fringes, while
others become salaried agents of those who are at the top. As
the new business system becomes specialized, with distinct sec-
tions and particular legal problems of its own, so do lawyers be-
come experts in distinct sections and particular problems, push-
ing the interests of these sections rather than standing outside
the business system and serving a law which co-ordinates the
parts of a society.
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 123
In the shadow of the large corporation, the leading lawyer is
selected for skill in the sure fix and the easy out-of-court settle-
ment. He has become a groomed personality whose professional
success is linked to a law office, the success of which in turn is
linked to the troubles of the big corporation and contact with
those outside the oflBce. He is a high legal strategist for high
finance and its profitable reorganizations, handling the aflFairs of
a cluster of banks and the companies in their sphere in the cheap-
est way possible, making the most of his outside opportunities
as an aide to big management that whistles him up by telephone;
impersonally teaching the financiers how to do what they want
within the law, advising on the chances they are taking and how
best to cover themselves. The complications of modern corporate
business and its dominance in modern society, A. A. Berle Jr. has
brilliantly shown, have made the lawyer 'an intellectual jobber
and contractor in business matters,' of all sorts. More than a con-
sultant and counselor to large business, the lawyer is its servant,
its champion, its ready apologist, and is full of its sensitivity.
Around the modem corporation, the lawyer has erected the
legal framework for the managerial demiurge.
As big capitalist enterprise came into social and economic
dominance the chance to climb to the top ranks without initial
large capital declined. But the law 'remained one of the careers
through which a man could attain influence and wealth even
without having capital at the start.' With law as background,
the lawyer has often become a businessman himself, a propri-
etor of high acumen, good training, many contacts, and sound
judgment. In his own right, he has also become the proprietor
and general manager of a factory of law, with forty lawyers
trained by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and two hundred clerks,
secretaries, and investigators to assist him. He competes with
other law factories in pecuniary skills and impersonal loyalties,
in turning out the standardized document and the subtle fix on a
mass production basis. Such offices must carry a huge overhead;
they must, therefore, obtain a steady flow of business; they there-
fore become adjuncts 'to the great commercial and investment
banks.' They appear less in court than as 'financial experts and
draftsmen of financial papers.'
124 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
The big money in law goes to some three or four hundred
metropohtan law factories specializing in corporation law and
constituting the brains of the corporate system. These law fac-
tories, as Ferdinand Lundberg has called them, are bureauc-
racies of middle size. Perhaps the largest has about seventy-five
lawyers, with an appropriate staff of office workers.
The top men are chosen as are film stars, for their glamour.
Behind them, the front men, stand men with technical abili-
ties, as in Hollywood, looking out for the main chance and some-
times finding it, but working for a small salary. Below the part-
ners are associates who are salaried lawyers, each usually work-
ing in a specialized department: general practice, litigation,
trusts, probate, real estate, taxation. Below them are the clerk-
apprentices in the law, then the investigators, bookkeepers,
stenographers, and clerks. In special instances there are certified
accountants and investment consultants, tax experts, engineers,
lobbyists, also ranged in rank. For every partner there may be
two salaried lawyer assistants, for every lawyer two or three
office workers. A partnership of 20 lawyers may thus have some
40 associates and 120 office workers. Such offices, geared to quan-
tity and speed of advice, must be highly organized and imper-
sonally administered. High overhead— including oriental rugs and
antique desks, panelled walls and huge leather libraries— often
accounts for 30 per cent of the fees charged; the office must earn
steadily, and the work be systematically ordered in the way of the
managerial demiurge everywhere. Under the supervision of one
of the partners, the office manager, sometimes a lawyer who
seldom practices law, must see that production lines and organi-
zation run smoothly. Efficiency experts are called in to check up
on the most effective operations for given tasks. In some offices
each salaried lawyer, like a mechanic in a big auto repair shop,
is required to account for his time, in order that fees may be
assigned to given cases and the practice kept moving.
Each department, in turn, has its subdivisions: specialization
is often intense. Teams of three lawyers or so, usually including
one partner, work for only one important client or on one type
of problem. Some lawyers spend all their time writing briefs,
others answer only constitutional questions; some deal in Federal
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 125
Trade Commission actions, others only with the ruhngs of the
Interstate Commerce Commission.
Much of the work is impersonal, vitiating the professional pre-
cept that lawyer and client should maintain a personal relation-
ship. Personal intercourse between the members of the profes-
sion and between lawyers and clients, calls upon each other on
matters of business, have been replaced by hurried telephone
conversations, limited to the business at hand, entirely eliminat-
ing the personal quality. An opponent may be absolutely un-
known, except over the telephone: you know the sound of his
voice, but if you were to meet him on the street, you would be
unable to recognize him. In the earlier days, a comparatively in-
timate acquaintance might have been formed even with an op-
ponent. Once a meeting in a lawyer's office with a client not only
was agreeable, but had a tendency to begin and cement a per-
sonal relationship. It now frequently happens that, although a
lawyer may be actively employed for a client, personal inter-
course does not occur.
Under this specialization, the young salaried lawyer does not
by his experience round out into a man adept at all branches of
law; indeed, his experience may specifically unfit him for general
practice. The big office, it is said within the bar, often draws its
ideas from the young men fresh from the preferred law schools,
whom the big offices 'rush,' like fraternity men seeking pledges.
Certainly the mass of the work is done by these able young men,
while their product goes out under the names of the senior
partners.
The young lawyer, just out of law school, fresh from matching
wits with law professors and bar examiners, lacks one thing im-
portant for successful practice— contacts. Not only knowledge of
trade secrets, but the number of contacts, is the fruit of what is
called experience in modern business professions. The young men
may labor and provide many of the ideas for the produce that
goes out under the older man's name, but the older man is the
business-getter: through his contacts, Karl Llewellyn has ob-
served, he can attract more orders than he or twenty like him
can supply. The measure of such a man is the volume of busi-
ness he can produce; he creates the job for the young salaried
lawyers, then puts his label on the product. He accumulates his
126 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
reputation outside the office from the success of the young men,
themselves striving for admittance to partnership, which comes
after each has picked up enough contacts that are too large and
dangerous to allow him to be kept within the salaried brackets.
In the meantime he sweats, and in the meantime, the new law-
school graduates are available every year, making a market with
depressed salaries, further shut out by those new young men who
have already inherited through their families a name that is of
front-oflBce caliber. The powerful connection, the strategic mar-
riage, the gilt-edged social life, these are the obvious means of
success.
Not only does the law factory serve the corporate system, but
the lawyers of the factory infiltrate that system. At the top they
sit on the Boards of Directors of banks and railroads, manufac-
turing concerns, and leading educational institutions. The firm
of Sullivan and Cromwell, one of the largest law factories, holds
65 directorships. Below the directors, staff lawyers may be vice
presidents of the corporation, other lawyers may be on annual
retainers, giving the corporation a proprietary right to the lawyer
as a moral agent. Of the corporation, for the corporation, by the
corporation. Listening in on every major directors' meeting,
phrasing public statements on all problems, the omnipresent legal
mind, an oflBcer of the court, assists the corporation, protects it,
cares for its interests.
As annex to the big finance, the law factory is in politics on a
national scale, but its interest in politics is usually only a means
of realizing its clients' economic interests. Yet the law>'er who is
successful in politics in his own right is all the more important
and useful to his former clients, to whose fold he often returns
after a political interlude. In corporation law firms one finds for-
mer senators and representatives, cabinet officers, federal prose-
cutors, state and federal tax officials, ambassadors and ministers,
and others who have been acquainted with the inside workings
of the upper levels of the government. High government ofii-
cials, cabinet oflBcers, ambassadors, and judges are often drawn
directly from the corporation law ofiices, the partners of which
welcome the opportunity to be of national service. Since the Civil
War, the corporation law firms have contributed many justices
to the United States Supreme Court; at present the majority of
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 127
its membeis are former corporation lawyers. Lawyers have been
in politics since the constitutional period but today the lawyers
from law factories work less as political heroes in the sunlight
than as fixers and lobbyists in the shade. When the TNEC in-
vestigations were going on, lawyers for the big corporations took
up one entire hotel in Washington, D.C.
There are also, of course, political law firms, smaller than the
law factories, which draw their clients from the political world
and regularly enter that world themselves. For it is through poli-
tics that the lawyer may attain a position on the bench. Usually
these political law oflBces have only local political interests.
Whereas corporate law factories are usually headed by men of
Anglo-Scotch stock, these political offices, mainly in the north-
east and in big cities, where politics often centers on immigrant
levels, are frequently staffed by Irish, Polish, Jewish, Italian
Americans. The opportunism of these smaller firms may make
them appear tolerant and liberal, and certainly many of the
partners in them are up from the ranks.
The lawyer uses political office as a link in a legal career,
and the politician uses legal training and law practice as links
in a political career. Skills of pleading and bargaining are trans-
ferable to politics; moreover, in exercising them as a lawyer,
there is a chance to obtain politically relevant publicity. The
lawyer is occupationally and financially mobile: more easily
than most men, he can earn a living and still give time to poli-
tics. So it is not surprising that 42 per cent of the members of
Congress in 1914, 1920, and 1926 and of state governors in 1920
and 1924 had been prosecuting attorneys; and of these, Ray-
mond Moley has calculated, 94 per cent had held this office
first or second in their political careers. Between 1790 and 1930,
Willard Hurst has computed, two-thirds of the Presidents and
of the U.S. Senate, and about half of the House of Representa-
tives were lawyers.
Below the corporation law offices and the political firms are
middle-sized law offices, containing from 3 to 20 partners and
few, if any, associates. These offices, especially in small towns,
are rooted in the local affairs of their business communities,
dividing their time between local politics and the practice of
local litigations. Finallv, at the bottom of the legal pyramid is
128 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
the genuine entrepreneur of law, the individual practitioner
who handles the legal affairs of individuals and small busi-
nesses. At the lower fringe of this stratum, in the big cities espe-
cially, are those lawyers who live 'dangerously close to the crim-
inal class.' The hierarchical structure of the legal profession is
thus not confined inside the big offices; it is characteristic of the
profession as a whole, within various cities as well as nationally.
In most cities, the legal work of banks and local industries,
of large estates and well-to-do families, is divided among a few
leading law firms, whose members sit on the boards of local
banks and companies, who lead church, college, and charity
affairs. They perpetuate themselves by carefully selecting the
most likely young men available and by nepotism, sons of rela-
tives, of partners, and of big clients being given marked pref-
erence over strangers, local graduates of local law schools over
outside ones. In St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, graduates of
Princeton or Yale often take their law work in St. Paul Law
School, rather than in the University of Minnesota, in order to
become acquainted with members of the local bar who act as
instructors. Below these leading firms, the small firms and indi-
vidual practitioners get the business that is left over: occasional
cases for well-to-do citizens, the plaintiff's damage suit, criminal
defense cases, divorce work. Below all these groups are the
lumpen-bourgeoisie of the law profession. Usually products of
local schools, they haunt the courts for pickups; large in num-
ber, small in income, living in the interstices of the legal-busi-
ness system, besieging the larger office for jobs, competing
among themselves, from time to time making irritating inroads
into the middle-sized firms, lowering the dignity of the profes-
sion's higher members by competing for retainers instead of
conferring a favor by accepting a case. Even as top men toady
to big corporation chieftains, men on the bottom assiduously
chase ambulances and cajole the injured.
Among the difficulties that have arisen for lawyers since 1929
is the fact that laymen are invading many fields that were long
considered the lawyers' domain. Drafting of deeds and mort-
gages has been taken over by real-estate men; various service
organizations have taken over taxation difficulties, automobile
accidents, and conditional sales; workmen's compensation now
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 129
takes care of many industrial accidents. There has also been a
declining use of courts and litigation methods of settling con-
troversies, caused by the public desire for speedy settlements.
Traditional litigation is giving way to a system of administra-
tive adjudication in which the lawyer has an equal footing with
the layman. Members of the legal profession are slowly losing
their monopoly of political careers, as men trained in such dis-
ciplines as economics increasingly find their way into higher
government oflSces.
Yet, despite the displacement of individual practitioner by
legal factory, law has remained enticing to many young men.
Thousands every year graduate from law schools. The war tem-
porarily solved the problem of 'crowding'; for the first time
since the early 'twenties, law schools were capable of finding
jobs for each graduate as enrollment was severely cut down by
the draft. But the bases of the problem for young, unconnected
lawyers, and for American society, still remain.
4. The Professors
Schoolteachers, especially those in grammar and high schools,
are the economic proletarians of the professions. These outlying
servants of learning form the largest occupational group of the
professional pyramid; some 31 per cent of all professional peo-
ple are schoolteachers of one sort or another. Like other white-
collar groups, their number has expanded enormously; they
have, in addition, been instrumental, through education, in the
birth and growth of many other white-collar groups.
The increase in enrollment and the consequent mass-produc-
tion methods of instruction have made the position of the col-
lege professor less distinctive than it once was. Although its
prestige, especiaHy in the larger centers, is considerably higher
than that of the public-school teacher, it does not usually attract
sons of cultivated upper-class families. The type of man who is
recruited for college teaching and shaped for this end by grad-
uate school training is very likely to have a strong plebeian
strain. His culture is typically narrow, his imagination often
limited. Men can achieve position in this field although they
are recruited from the lower-middle class, a milieu not remark-
130 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
able for grace of mind, flexibility or breadth of culture, or scope
of imagination. The profession thus includes many persons who
have experienced a definite rise in class and status position,
and who in making the climb are more likely, as Logan Wilson
has put it, to have acquired 'the intellectual than the social
graces/ It also includes people of 'typically plebeian cultural
interests outside the field of specialization, and a generally philis-
tine style of life/
Men of brilliance, energy, and imagination are not often at-
tracted to college teaching. The Arts and Sciences graduate
schools, as the president of Harvard has indicated, do not re-
ceive 'their fair share of the best brains and well-developed,
forceful personalities.' Law and medical schools have done much
better. It is easier to become a professor, and it is easier to con-
tinue out of inertia. Professions such as law and medicine oflFer
few financial aids by way of fellowships, while that of teaching
the higher learning offers many.
The graduate school is often organized as a 'feudal' system:
the student trades his loyalty to one professor for protection
against other professors. The personable young man, willing to
learn quickly the thought-ways of others, may succeed as readily
or even more readily than the truly original mind in intensive
contact with the world of learning. The man who is willing to
be apprenticed to some professor is more useful to him.
Under the mass demand for higher degrees, the graduate
schools have expanded enormously, often developing a me-
chanically given doctoral degree. Departmental barriers are
accentuated as given departments become larger in personnel
and budget. Given over mainly to preparing college teachers,
the graduate schools equip their students to fulfil one special
niche. This is part of the whole vocationalizing of education—
the preparation of people to fulfil technical requirements and
skills for immediate adjustment to a job.
The specialization that is required for successful operation as
a college professor is often deadening to the mind that would
grasp for higher culture in the modem world. There now is, as
Whitehead has indicated, a celibacy of the intellect. Often the
only 'generalization' the professor permits himself is the text-
book he writes in the field of his work. Such serious thought as
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 131
he engages in is thought within one specialty, one groove; the
remainder of hfe is treated superficially. The professor of social
science, for example, is not very likely to have as balanced an
intellect as a top-flight journalist, and it is usually considered
poor taste, inside the academies, to write a book outside of one's
own field. The professionalization of knowledge has thus nar-
rowed the grasp of the individual professor; the means of his
success further this trend; and in the social studies and the hu-
manities, the attempt to imitate exact science narrows the mind
to microscopic fields of inquiry, rather than expanding it to em-
brace man and society as a whole. To make his mark he must
specialize, or so he is encouraged to believe; so a college faculty
of 150 members is split into 30 or 40 departments, each autono-
mous, each guarded by the established or, even worse, the
almost-established man who fears encroachment or consolidation
of his specialty.
After he is established in a college, it is unlikely that the pro-
fessor's milieu and resources are the kind that will facilitate, much
less create, independence of mind. He is a member of a petty
hierarchy, almost completely closed in by its middle-class en-
vironment and its segregation of intellectual from social life. In
such a hierarchy, mediocrity makes its own rules and sets its
own image of success. And the path of ascent itself is as likely
to be administrative duty as creative work.
But the shaping of the professor by forces inside the academy
is only part of the story. The U.S. educational system is not
autonomous; what happens in it is quite dependent upon changes
in other areas of society. Schools are often less centers of initia-
tive than adaptive organisms; teachers are often less independ-
ent minds than low-paid employees.
External circumstances and demands have affected the en-
rollment and curriculum of high schools and colleges, as well as
the types of teachers, and the roles they play within and out of
the academy. By making an analogy between the world of knowl-
edge and the economic system, we can get a fuller picture of
the types of academic men who people U.S. centers of higher
learning.
132 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
The producer is the man who creates ideas, first sets them
forth, possibly tests them, or at any rate makes them available
in writing to those portions of the market capable of understand-
ing them. Among producers there are individual entrepreneurs-
still the predominant type— and corporation executives in research
institutions of various kinds who are in fact administrators over
production units. Then there are the wholesalers, who while they
do not produce ideas do distribute them in textbooks to other
academic men, who in turn sell them directly to student consum-
ers. In so far as men teach, and only teach, they are retailers of
ideas and materials, the better of them being serviced by original
producers, the lesser, by wholesalers. All academic men, regard-
less of type, are also consumers of the products of others, of pro-
ducers and wholesalers through books, and of retailers to some
extent through personal conversation on local markets. But it is
possible for some to specialize in consumption: these become
great comprehenders, rather than users, of books, and they are
great on bibliographies.
In most colleges and universities, all these types are repre-
sented, all may flourish; but the producer (perhaps along with
the textbook wholesaler) has been honored the most.
The general hierarchy of academic standing runs from the full
professor in a graduate school, who teaches very little and does
much research, to the instructor of undergraduates, who teaches
a great deal and does little or no research. Getting ahead aca-
demically means attracting students, but at the same time pursu-
ing research work— and in the end, especially for the younger
man, publication may weigh more heavily than teaching success.
The normal academic career has involved a hierarchy within an
institution, but success within this institution draws heavily upon
outside success. There is a close interaction between local teach-
ing, research publication, and offers from other institutions.
In the twentieth century, academic life in America has by and
large failed to make ambitious men contented with simple aca-
demic careers. The profession carries little status in relation to
the pecuniary sacrifices often involved; the pay and hence the
style of life is often relatively meager; and the discontent of
some scholars is heightened by their awareness that their intelli-
gence far exceeds that of men who have attained power and pres-
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 133
tige in other fields. For such unhappy professors, new devel-
opments in research and administration offer gratifying op-
portunities to become, so to speak, Executives without having to
become Deans.
As internal academic forces turn some professors into retailers
or administrators, external forces draw others, especially in the
big universities, toward careers of a new entrepreneurial type.
War experience has indicated that the professor can be useful
in government programs, as well as in the armed forces. But it is
research that is most likely to get him out of the academy and
into other life-situations. It is also in connection with research,
and the money it entails, that professors become more directly
an appendage of the larger managerial demiurge, which their
professional positions allow them to sanctify as well as to serve in
more technical ways. Since knowledge is a commodity that may
be sold directly, perhaps it is inevitable that some professors
specialize in selling knowledge after others have created it, and
that still others shape their intellectual work to meet the market
directly. Like the pharmacist who sells packaged drugs with
more authority than the ordinary storekeeper, the professor sells
packaged knowledge with better effect than laymen. He brings
to the market the prestige of his university position and of the
ancient academic tradition of disinterestedness. This halo of dis-
interestedness has more than once been turned to the interests
of companies who purchase the professor's knowledge and the
name of his university.
It has long been known, of course, that economics has been
the 'Swiss guard of the vested interests'— but usually from some
distance. Now, however, many top professional economists are
direct agents of business. Engineers and lawyers, the most fre-
quent professionals found in the service of advising business, are
being joined by academicians, who associate with management
in the solution of policy problems, who gauge the market for
products, and who assay opinions about the firm or about busi-
ness in general. These needs have increased as business and
trade associations have become larger and have taken up the role
of economic statesmen for the entire economy. For these organi-
zations have felt the need of spokesmen for their new roles,
and as public relations has become a top management concern,
134 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
simple hot air has lost ground to research, carefully prepared
for internal and external uses. This has meant that researchers
of some talent have to be retained, as well as professors from
various universities, who set the seal of their universities upon
the research findings.
The new academic practicality, in the social studies, for in-
stance, is not concerned with the broken-up human results of the
social process: the bad boy, the loose woman, the uur American-
ized immigrant. On the contrary, it is tied in with the top levels
of society, in particular with enlightened circles of business ex-
ecutives. For the first time in the history of their disciphne, for
example, sociologists have become linked by professional tasks
and social contacts with private and public powers well above
the level of the social-work agency. Now, alongside the old, there
are the new practitioners who study workers who are restless and
lack morale, and managers who do not understand the art of
managing human relations.
Among social science and business professors in three or four
large universities, the new entrepreneurial pattern of success is
well under way. One often hears in these centers that 'the pro-
fessor does everything but teach.' He is a consultant to large cor-
porations, real-estate bodies, labor-management committees; he
has built his own research shop, from which he sells research
services and the prestige of his university's traditional impar-
tiality. He becomes a man with a staff— and with overhead. It is
high overhead with a system of fees for given jobs that causes
his business-like frenzy. The fact that such an academic entre-
preneur is not usually out after money often gives the outsider
the impression that the professor is play-acting at business, gain-
ing prestige because of his own eccentricity and low personal
income. But regardless of motives or consequences, some aca-
demic careers are becoming dependent upon the traits of the go-
getter in business and the manager in the corporation.
It must be understood that all this is still exceptional, certainly
so in terms of the number of professors involved. It may well be
seen as an interlude, for on the one side, as the professorial entre-
preneur succeeds, his university takes over what he has built,
turning it into a department of the endowed plant, and using its
reputation to get more respectable, steady money. And on the
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 135
Other side, the orientation and technical skills taught to appren-
tices enable them to enter the corporations and government bu-
reaus as professional employees.
In contrast with businessmen and other laymen, the professors
are probably not primarily concerned with the pecuniary, the
managerial, or the political uses of their practicality. Such results
are to them primarily means to other ends which center around
their 'careers.' It is true that professors certainly welcome the
small increases to their salaries that may come with research
activity: they may or may not feel gratified to be helping man-
agers administer their plant more profitably and with less trouble;
they may or may not be powerfully lifted by building new and
more intellectually acceptable ideologies for established powers.
But in so far as they remain scholars, their extra-intellectual aims
center around furthering their careers.
From this point of view, the professor's participation in the
new ideological and practical studies is, in part, a response to the
new job opportunities arising from the increased scale and in-
tensified bureaucratic character of modern business and govern-
ment, and from the institutionalization of the relations between
business corporations and the rest of the community. Bureaucrati-
zation brings with it an increased demand for experts and the
formation of new career patterns: social scientists responding to
this demand, more or less happily, become business and govern-
ment officials, on higher or lower levels. The centers of higher
learning themselves reflect this outside demand for scholars by
tending increasingly to produce supposedly apoHtical techni-
cians, as against free intellectuals. Thus college-trained labor-
relations scholars become 'experts' and serve on the War Labor
Board, rather than write and fight for radical and/or conserva-
tive publics and for the public dissemination of theoretical ideas.
In this connection, modern war is the health of the expert and,
particularly, the expert in the rhetoric of liberal justification.
For those who remain in academic life the career of the new
entrepreneur has become available. This type of man is able to
further his career in the university by securing prestige and small-
scale powers outside of it. Above all, he is able to set up on the
campus a respectably financed institute that brings the academic
community into contact with men of affairs, thus often becoming
136 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
the envy of his more cloistered colleagues and looked to by them
for leadership in university affairs.
Yet there is evidence, here and there, even among the youngest
men in the greatest hurry, that these new careers, while lifting
them out of the academic rut, may have dropped them into some-
thing which in its way is at least as unsatisfactory. At any rate,
the new academic entrepreneurs often seem unaware just what
their goals may be: indeed, they do not seem to have firmly in
mind even the terms in which possible success may be defined.
As a group, American professors have seldom if ever been
politically engaged: the trend toward a technician's role has, by
strengthening their apolitical professional ideology, reduced
whatever political involvement they may have had and often,
by sheer atrophy, their ability even to grasp political problems.
That is why one often encounters middle-rank journalists who
are more politically alert than top sociologists, economists, or
political scientists.
The American university system seldom provides political
training— that is, how to gauge what is going on in the general
struggle for power in modem society. Social scientists have had
little or no real contact with such insurgent sections of the com-
munity as exist; there is no left-wing press with which the average
academic man in the course of his career would come into live
contact; there is no movement which would support or give pres-
tige, not to speak of jobs, to the political intellectual; the aca-
demic community has few roots in labor circles. This vacuum
means that the American scholar's situation allows him to take
up the new practicality— in effect to become a political tool-
without any shift of political ideology and with little political
guilt.
5. Business and the Professions
United States society esteems the exercise of educated skill,
and honors those who are professionally trained; it also esteems
money as fact and as symbol, and honors those who have a lot
of it. Many professional men are thus at the intersection of these
two systems of value and many businessmen strive to add the
professional to the pecuniary. When we speak of the commer-
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 137
cialization of the professions, or of the professionalization of
business, we point to the conflict or the merging of skill and
money. Out of this merging, professions have become more like
businesses, and businesses have become more like professions.
The line between them has in many places become obscured,
especially as businesses have become big and have hired men of
the established professions.
Yet, in so far as both business and the professions are organized
in bureaucratic structures, the present differences between their
individual practitioners are not great. The managerial demiurge
involves both business and the professions, and, as it does so,
individuals perform duties within specific ojBBces, making money
for the organization perhaps, but themselves receiving a salary.
For the salaried agent the consequences of a businesslike decision
react not directly upon his own bank account, but upon the profit
position of the firm for which he works.
If more and more businesses and occupations in America are
called professions, or their practitioners try to behave like pro-
fessionals, this is certainly not, as has been claimed by Harold
Laski, because of any 'equalitarian' urge, either on the part of
the country as a whole or on the part of the established profes-
sions. It is most crucially a result of the fact that as business has
become enlarged and complicated, the skills needed to operate
it become more diflBcult to acquire through an apprenticeship.
People have had to be more highly trained, and often very spe-
cialized. Business has thus become a market for educated labor;
including both the established as well as the newer professions,
it has itself come to educate in the process of its own work.
When, as is happening today, special training for selected man-
agers of business is instituted, and when such training becomes a
prerequisite to being hired, then we can speak of business as a
profession, like medicine or law. Today the situation is quite
mixed, but large businesses are moving in this direction.
Increasingly both business and the professions are being ra-
tionally organized, so that the 'science of business' arises in the
schools even as do courses in 'business practice' for doctors and
lawyers. Both businessmen and professionals strive for rationality
of the social machineries in which they work, and are honored if
they achieve it. Both strive to become looked upon as experts and
138 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
to be so judged, within a narrowed area of specific competence.
Both are masters of abstracted human relations, whether as in
business they see a customer, or in the professions a cHent or case.
The main trend is for the bureaucratic organization of business-
men and of professionals to turn both into bureaucrats, profes-
sionalized occupants of specified offices and specialized tasks. It
is certainly not in terms of 'pecuniary vs. service,' or in any terms
of motivation, that business and the professions can be distin-
guished.
The businessman, it has been thought, egotistically pursues his
self-interest, whereas the professional man altruistically serves
the interest of others. Such distinctions do prevail, but, as Talcott
Parsons has correctly observed, the difference is not between
egotistic self-interest and altruism. It is, rather, a difference in
the entrance requirement, as this bears upon specialized train-
ing; a difference in the way the professional and business groups
are socially organized and controlled; and a difference in the
rules that govern the internal and external relations of the mem-
bers of each group.
If professional men are not expected to advertise (although
some of them do), if they are expected, as in medicine or law,
to take cases in need regardless of credit rating (although there
is wide variation on this point), if they are forbidden to com-
pete with one another for clients in terms of costs ( although some
do)— this is not because they are less self-interested than busi-
nessmen; it is because they are organized, in a guild-like system,
so as best to promote long-run self-interest. It does not matter
whether as individuals they are aware of this as a social fact or
understand it only as an ethical matter.
So effective is the professional ideology of altruistic service
that businessmen, especially certain types of small traders, are
eagerly engaged in setting up the same practices of non-compe-
tition and guild-like closure. Even among businessmen who are
not directly involved in the technicalities of modern business
bureaucracy, there is the urge to seem professional and to enjoy
professional privileges. This, first of all, rests upon their aspira-
tions for status: the 'professional' wears a badge of prestige. Any
position that is 'responsible and steady' and, above all, that car-
ries prestige may become known, or at least promoted by its
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS 139
members, as a profession. Real-estate men become realtors; un-
dertakers become morticians; advertising men and public-rela-
tions counsels, radio commentators and gag men, interior deco-
rators and special-effects experts all try to look and act 'profes-
sional.' This trend is allowed and encouraged, if not implemented,
by the fact that business functions, and so businessmen, are often
accorded so high a status that they can 'borrow' the status adher-
ing to other pursuits. If the professions are honorific, the business-
man reasons, then business should be a profession.
One method of achieving this status, as well as of increasing
income and warding off competition, is to close up the ranks
without forming labor unions, to form professional associations
which limit entrance to the fields of profits and fees. It was not
until the 'seventies that the first state bar examinations were in-
stalled and medical licensing was begun; accountants, architects,
and engineers were licensed at the beginning of the twentieth
century. But by the 1930's, according to Willard Hurst's count in
18 representative states, some 210 occupations or businesses had
come under some sort of legal closure.
The chief stock in trade, for example, of pharmacists as small
businessmen is their status, however anomalous, as professional
men. Their professional claims and prestige encourage the con-
sumer's confidence in the goods they sell; and, as one business
journal asserts, 'their legal franchise as professional dispensers
of health products enables them to stay open and sell non-drug
products at odd times— Sundays, holidays, at night— when other
stores are closed.' The professional basis of pharmacists, however,
has been slipping, because packaged drug sales have increased,
while prescription sales have declined.
The economic meaning of the pharmacists' claims to profes-
sional status lies in the fact that they will lose many drug sales
unless restrictive laws limit such sales to registered pharmacists.
In part at least, the professional cry of the pharmacist is the eco-
nomic cry of a small businessman against drug manufacturers
who desire broader outlets. Small druggists often consider it
highly unethical, even as do doctors, to compete in terms of the
prices of retail price-maintained goods. They, too, would like a
professional closure and 'professional standing.' In the extreme
case, ostracism and expulsion are used to uphold the rules of the
140 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
guild in a society dominated by the acquisition and guarantee of
profit. The balance between wise restraint and commercial ad-
vantage is uneasy, the line between them diflBcult to draw.
The merging type of professional-and-businessman seeks to be
and often is an entrepreneur who can exploit special privileges.
Among these is the use of both business and professional bu-
reaucracies. The professor sells the prestige of his university to
secure market-research jobs in order to build a research unit; he
is privileged over commercial agencies because of his connection
with the university. The doctor who is connected with the hos-
pital secures patients as well as the use of equipment because of
his connection. The lawyer, in his shuttles between one business
and another, and between business and government, borrows
prestige from both.
Like other privileged groups, the professional entrepreneurs
and the entrepreneurial professionals seek to monopolize their
positions by closing up their ranks; they seek to do so by law and
by stringent rules of education and entrance. Whenever there is
a feeling of declining opportunity, occupational groups will seek
such closure. That strategy is now back of many of the rules and
policies adopted by professional associations as well as by busi-
nessmen who seek to claim professional status.
The ingenious bureaucracies among professionals, the increased
volumes of work demanded of them, the coincidence of the
managerial demiurge with commercial zeal, and all the policies
and attempts on the part of professional and business groups to
close up their ranks— these developments are alienating the indi-
vidual, free intelligence from many white-collared professionals.
Individual reflection is being centralized, sometimes at the top,
more often just next to the top, as there are jobs requiring and
monopolizing more of it, and, down the white-collar line, jobs
requiring or allowing less of it.
The centralization of planful reflection and the consequent ex-
propriation of individual rationality parallel the rationalization
of the white-collar hierarchy as a whole. What a single individual
used to do is now broken up into functions of decision and re-
search, direction and checking up, each performed by a separate
group of individuals. Many executive functions are thus becom-
OLD PROFESSIONS AND NEW SKILLS ]4T
ing less autonomous and permitting less initiative. The centrali-
zation of reflection entails for many the deprivation of initiative:
for them, decision becomes the application of fixed rules. Yet
these developments do not necessarily mean that the top men
have less intellectual tasks to perform; they mean rather, as Henri
de Man has observed, that the less intellectual tasks are broken
up and transferred down the hierarchy to the semi-skilled white-
collar employees, while the managerial top becomes even more
intellectualized, and the unit of its intellectuality becomes a set
of specialized staffs. The more those down the line are deprived
of intellectual content in their work, the more those on top need
to be intellectualized, or at least the more dependent they be-
come upon the intellectually skilled.
If in this process some professionals are forced down the line,
more of those who take on the new subaltern intellectual tasks
come from lower down the social scale. For the centralization
of professional skills and the industrialization of many intel-
lectual functions have not narrowed the full professional stratum
so much as proliferated the semi-professions and the quasi-intel-
lectual, and between these and the fully professional, created a
more marked separation. So great has the expansion been that
children of the wage-worker and the clerk are often raised into
semi-professional status, while top men of the professional world
merge with business and become professional entrepreneurs of
the managerial demiurge.
7
Brains, Inc.
WF all middle-class groups, intellectuals are the most far-flung
and heterogeneous. Unlike small businessmen, factory workers,
or filing clerks, intellectuals have been relatively classless. They
have no common origin and share no common social destiny.
They differ widely in income and in status; some live, residen-
tially and intellectually, in suburban slums; others, in propa-
ganda bureaus of continent-wide nations. Many intellectuals are
members of the old middle class; they work a specialized market
made up of editors and business managers, as entrepreneurs us-
ing their education and their verbal skills as capital. Others are
primarily new middle class: their styles of life and of work are
set by their position as salaried employees in various white-collar
pyramids.
Many professional people, by virtue of their education and
leisure, have a good chance to become intellectuals, and many
intellectuals earn their living by practicing some profession.
Moreover, people of professional skills form a substantial pro-
portion of the intellectuals' public. So what happens to profes-
sional and technical groups also affects the intellectuals' condi-
tions of work and life.
Intellectuals cannot be defined as a single social unit, but
rather as a scattered set of grouplets. They must be defined in
terms of their function and their subjective characteristics rather
than in terms of their social position: as people who specialize
in symbols, the intellectuals produce, distribute, and preserve
distinct forms of consciousness. They are the immediate carriers
142
BRAINS, INC. 143
of art and of ideas. They may have no direct responsibihty for
any practice; or, being engaged in institutional roles, they may
be firmly attached to going institutions. They may be onlookers
and outsiders, or overseers and insiders; but however that may
be, as intellectuals they are people who live for and not o§ ideas.
Seeking to cultivate a sense of individual mind, they have
been, in their self-images, detached from popular values and
stereotypes, and they have not been consciously beholden to
anyone for the fixing of their beliefs. A remark William Phillips
made of modern literature applies equally well to intellectuals:
they have been in 'recoil from the practices and values of society
toward some form of self-sufficiency, be it moral, or physical, or
merely historical, with repeated fresh starts from the bohemian
underground as each new movement runs itself out. . .' They
are thus 'in a kind of permanent mutiny against the regime of
utility and conformity. . .' All these elements of 'freedom' hold
for political as well as artistic intellectuals. All intellectual work
is, in fact, relevant in so far as it is focused upon symbols that
justify, debunk, or divert attention from authority and its exer-
cise. Political intellectuals are specialized dealers in such sym-
bols and states of political consciousness; they create, facilitate,
and criticize the beliefs and ideas that support or attack ruling
classes, institutions and policies; or they divert attention from
these structures of power and from those who command and
benefit from them as going concerns.
For a brief liberal period in western history, many intellec-
tuals were free in the sense mentioned. They were in a some-
what unique historical situation, even as the situation of the
small entrepreneur was unique: one historic phase sandwiched be-
tween two more highly organized phases. The eighteenth-century
intellectual stood on common ground with the bourgeois entre-
preneur; both were fighting, each in his own way, against the
remnants of feudal control, the writer seeking to free himself
from the highly placed patron, the businessman breaking the
bonds of the chartered enterprise. Both were fighting for a new
kind of freedom, the writer for an anonymous public, the busi-
nessman for an anonymous and unbounded market. It was their
victory which Philip Rahv describes when he says that 'during
the greater part of the bourgeois epoch . . . [the artist] pre-
144 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
ferred alienation from the community to alienation from him-
self,' But no longer are such conditions of freedom available for
the entrepreneur or the intellectual, and nowhere has its col-
lapse for intellectuals been more apparent than in twentieth-
century America.
1. Four Phases
The practice of a free intellectual life has in the course of
this century undergone several transformations and come up
against several rather distinct sets of circumstance. To follow
these changes it is necessary to examine shifting models of
thought and mood and to track down intangible influences.
Throughout this century there has arisen a new kind of patron-
age system for free intellectuals, which at mid-century seems
to have eflFected a loss of political will and even of moral hope.
An over-simplified history of free, political intellectuals in the
United States falls into four broad phases, outlined according
to their major areas of attention and their pivotal values.
I. Before World War I, the liberalism of pragmatic thought
was widespread among muckrakeis, who individually sought
out the facts of injustice and corruption and reported them to
the middle class. In the first decade and a half of the century,
these intellectuals as muckrakers had a firm base in a mass
public; in magazines like McCliire's they could operate as free-
lance journalists, focusing on specific cities and specific busi-
nesses. In that expanding society, with new routines and groups
arising, these intellectuals were sometimes overwhelmed by
the need for sheer description, but they were critical journal-
ists, having a vested interest in attack on established corruption,
in a kind of ethical bookkeeping for the old middle-class world.
In fact, muckraking attacks were thought or were feared to
be so effective that, in reflex fashion, men of power hired pub-
licity agents to defend their authority and their public images.
Some of these publicity agents were at least in the beginning
intellectuals: it is, in fact, characteristic of intellectuals that
they are able to attach themselves to the defense and elabora-
tion of almost any social interest. By World War I, many who
BRAINS, INC. 145
had been muckrakers took up the defense of a new synthetic
faith that was being created for the vested interests. The very
magazines for which the muckrakers wrote, Wilham Miller has
shown, were in due course transformed into carefully guarded
advertising media of enormous circulation.
The muckrakers did not, of course, monopolize the intellec-
tual scene. Centered in Henry Adams' house in Washington,
D.C., and in the circles of strenuous idea-men like Theodore
Roosevelt, there was a conservative elite who also were critical
of crass capitalism, but in a gentlemanly manner, from the
standpoint of the patrician rentier. The muckrakers and con-
servatives did not long remain free or retain any unity: pre-
cisely because of their multiplicity of origin and interests, and
their social heterogeneity, it was not difficult for them to take
the different directions and join the different classes or parties
that they did.
II. The range of styles for intellectuals available in the 'twen-
ties, as they 'attempted to reconcile themselves to the brokers'
world,' has been well-described by Edmund Wilson: 'the atti-
tude of the Menckenian gentleman, ironic, beer-loving and
"civilized," living principally on the satisfaction of feeling su-
perior to the broker and enjoying the debauchment of American
life as a burlesque show; the attitude of the old-American-
stock smugness . . . the liberal attitude that American capitalism
was going to show a new wonder to the world by gradually
and comfortably socializing itself and that we should just have
to respect and like it in the meantime, taking a great interest in
Dwight Morrow and Owen D. Young; the attitude of trying to
get a kick out of the sheer energy and size of American enter-
prises, irrespective of what they were aiming at; the attitude of
proudly withdrawing and cultivating a refined sensibility; the
attitude of letting one's self be carried along by the mad hilarity
and tragedy of jazz, of living only for the excitement of the
night.'
What all these attitudes have in common is an apolitical tone,
or a cultivated relaxation into a soft kind of liberalism, which
relieved political tension and dulled political perception. The in-
146 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
tellectuals diverted public attention from major political symbols,
even as they broke cultural and social idols. Many rejected mid-
dle-western America for the eastern cities and, in fact, all America
for Europe, but their revolt was esthetic and literary rather than
explicitly political. It was an enthusiastic revolt against 'provin-
cial' regional hankerings, against social and ideological propria
eties, against gentility in all forms.
m. For a while, during the 'thirties, there was a widespread
model of the intellectual as political agent. Some of the most
talented free intellectuals played at being Leninist men. They
joined or traveled with splinter parties, with first the Third and
then the Fourth International; they wrote in support of the gen-
eral ideas and policies current in these circles.
For the first several decades of this century, pragmatism was
the nerve of leftward thinking. By the nineteen-thirties, as prag-
matism as such began to decline as a common denominator of
liberalism, its major theme was given new hfe by a fashionable
Marxism. One idea ran through both ideologies: the optimistic
faith in man's rationality. In pragmatism this rationality was for-
mally located in the individual; in Marxism in a class of men;
but in both it was a motif so dominant as to set the general mood.
In Marx's theory of historical change, as modified by Lenin,
the intellectual supplemented the proletariat. Only if these gad-
flies, bearing the idea, joined the movement as its heroic van-
guard would the workers make a new world— or at least so did
many U.S. intellectuals interpret Leninism.
Some few joined the organizing sta£Fs of unions, becoming jour-
nalists and publicity agents, to gauge when the time was ripe—
although none became firmly attached to the labor movement
without ceasing to be intellectuals. But also novelists, critics, and
poets, historians, both academic and free-lance— the leading in-
tellectuals—became political, went left. If they broke away from
the Communist party, as members or as fellow travelers, still they
remained radical, as Trotskyist intellectuals or as independent
leftists. For a time, all live intellectual work was derived from
leftward circles or spent its energy defending itself against left
views.
BRAINS, INC. 147
IV. With the war came a period of dehberation. Intellectuals
broke with the old radicalism and became in one way or another
liberals and patriots, or gave up politics altogether. Dwight Mac-
donald has observed how religious obscurantists,' who returned
to precapitalist values, and 'totalitarian liberals,' who accepted
the process of rationalization, trying to make of it a positive
thing, came forth, bringing with them a strong effort to de-politi-
cize the war in every respect. And, as James Farrell has pointed
out, a 'metaphysics of the war' was necessary: in the name of
the American past such men as Brooks, MacLeish, and Mumford,
oflBcial spokesmen of the war ideology, provided it. Intellectuals
who remained free, who scorned the new metaphysics, were still
much affected by it because it had the initiative, even as big busi-
ness gained the initiative inside the war agencies: WPA became
WPB for many businessmen and for many intellectuals.
In the effort to discuss but not face up to the irresponsibilities
and sustaining deceptions of modern society at war, the publi-
cists called upon images of the Future. But even the production
of Utopias seemed to be controlled, monopolized by adjuncts of
big business, who set the technological trap by dangling baubles
before the public without telling how those goods might be
widely distributed. Political writers focused attention away from
the present and into the several planful models of the future,
drawn up as sources of unity and morale. 'Post-war planning,'
with emphasis upon the coming technological marvels, was the
chief intellectual form of war propaganda in America.
Few intellectuals arose to protest against the war on political
or moral grounds, and the prosperity after the war, in which in-
tellectuals shared, was for them a time of moral slump. They
have not returned to politics, much less turned left again, and no
new generation has yet moved into their old stations. With this
disintegration has gone political will; in its place there is hope-
lessness. Among U.S. intelligentsia, as all over the world, Lionel
Trilling has remarked, the 'political mind lies passive before
action and the event . . . we are in the hands of the com-
mentator.'
Since the war years, the optimistic, rational faith has obvi-
ously been losing out in competition with more tragic views of
political and personal life. Many who not long ago read Dewey
148 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
or Marx with apparent satisfaction have become more vitally in-
terested in such analysts of personal tragedy as Soren Kierkegaard
or such mirrors of hopeless baflBement as Kafka. Attempts to re-
instate the old emphasis on the power of man's intelligence to
control his destiny have not been taken up by American intel-
lectuals, spurred as they are by new worries, seeking as they are
for new gods. Suffering the tremors of men who face defeat, they
are worried and distraught, some only half aware of their condi-
tion, others so painfully aware that they must obscure their
knowledge by rationalistic busy-work and many forms of self-
deception.
No longer can they read, without smirking or without bitter-
ness, Dewey's brave words, 'Every thinker puts some portion of
an apparently stable world in peril,' or Bertrand Russell's
'Thought looks into the face of hell and is not afraid,' much less
Marx's notion that the role of the philosopher was not to inter-
pret but to change the world. Now they hear Charles Peguy: 'No
need to conceal this from ourselves: we are defeated. For ten
years, for fifteen years, we have done nothing but lose ground.
Today, in the decline, in the decay of political and private morals,
literally we are beleaguered. We are in a place which is in a state
of siege and more than blockaded and all the flat country is in
the hands of the enemy.' What has happened is that the terms of
acceptance of American life have been made bleak and super-
ficial at the same time that the terms of revolt have been made
vulgar and irrelevant. The malaise of the American intellectual
is thus the malaise of a spiritual void.
The political failure of intellectual nerve is no simple retreat
from reason. The ideas current among intellectuals are not merely
fads of an epoch of world wars and slumps. The creation and
diffusion of ideas and moods must be understood as social and
historical phenomena. What is happening is not entirely ex-
plained, however, by the political defeat and internal decay of
radical parties. The loss of will and even of ideas among intel-
lectuals must in the first instance be seen in terms of their self-
images, which have in turn been anchored in social movements
and political trends. To understand what has been happening to
American intellectual life we have to go beyond the decline of
radical movements and of Marxism as a packaged intellectual
BRAINS, INC. 149
option, and realize the effects upon the carriers of intellectual life
of certain deep-lying, long-term trends of modern social and ideo-
logical organization.
2. The Bureaucratic Context
Bureaucracy increasingly sets the conditions of intellectual life
and controls the major market for its products. The new bureauc-
racies of state and business, of party and voluntary association,
become the major employers of intellectuals and the main cus-
tomers for their work. So strong has this demand for technical
and ideological intelligentsia of all sorts become that it might
even be said that a new patronage system of a complicated and
sometimes indirect kind has arisen. Not only the New Deal, Hol-
lywood, and the Luce enterprises, but business concerns of the
most varied types, as well as that curious set of institutions
clustering around Stalinism, have come to play an important role
in the cultural and marketing life of the intellectual. The Young
& Rubicam mentality is not confined to Young and Rubicam;
there are wider groupings which have become adjuncts of the
marketeers and which display the managing mentality and style
of those who sell systematically.
The 'opinion-molding profession,' Elliot Cohen has observed,
'is a tight little community, inhabiting a small territory four
blocks wide and ten or so blocks long centering around Radio
City, with business suburbs of the same narrow geographical
dimensions in Hollywood and Chicago. . .' But its reach is wide:
at the top, the communications intellectuals (idea men, techni-
cians, administrators) blend with the managerial demiurge in
more concrete businesses. Indeed, the styles of work and life of
intellectuals and managers, as well as their dominating interests,
coincide at many points. In and around these managed structures
are intellectuals who, given the modern dominance, must now be
considered as hold-outs. And between the two there is much
traffic.
For the intellectual who would remain free yet still seek a
public, this general trend is sharpened by the fact that, in a bu-
reaucratic world of organized irresponsibility, the difficulty of
speaking one's mind in dissent has increased. Between the intel-
150 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
lectual and his potential public stand technical, economic, and
social structures which are owned and operated by others. The
medium of pamphlets oflFered to Tom Paine a direct channel to
readers that the world of mass advertising-supported publica-
tions clearly cannot afford to provide the dissenter. If the intel-
lectual becomes the hired man of an information industry, his
general aims must, of course, be set by the decisions of others
rather than by his own integrity. If he is working for such indus-
tries on a 'putting-out' basis, he is of course only one short step
from the hired-man status, although in his case manipulation
rather than authority may be exercised. The freedom of the free-
lance is minimized when he goes to market, and if he does go,
his freedom is without public value.
Even craftsmanship, so central to intellectual and artistic grati-
fication, is thwarted for an increasing number of intellectual
workers who find themselves in the predicament of the Holly-
wood writer. Unlike the Broadway playwright who retains at
least some command over his play when the manager, director,
and cast take it over, the Hollywood script writer has no assur-
ance that what he writes will be produced in even recognizable
form. His work is bent to the ends of mass effects to sell a mass
market; and his major complaint, as Robert E. Sherwood has
said, is not that he is underpaid, but that while he has responsi-
bility for his work he has no real authority over it.
The themes of mass literature and entertainment, of pulps and
slicks, of radio drama and television script, are thus set by the
editor or director. The writer merely fills an order, and often he
will not write at all until he has an order, specifying content,
slant, and space limits. Even the editor of the mass magazine,
the director of the radio drama, has not escaped the depersonali-
zation of publishing and entertainment; he is also the employee
of a business enterprise, not a personality in his own right. Mass
magazines and radio shows are not so much edited by a per-
sonality as regulated by an adroit formula.
With the general speed-up of the literary industry and the ad-
vent of go-getters in publishing, the character of book publishing
has changed. Writers have always been somewhat limited by the
taste and mentality of their readers, but the variety and levels to
which the publishing industry was geared made possible a large
BRAINS, INC. 151
amount of freedom. Recent changes in the mass distribution of
books may very well require, .as do the production and distribu-
tion of films, a more cautious, standardized product. It is likely
that fewer and fewer publishers will handle more and more of
those manuscripts which reach mass publics through large-scale
channels of distribution.
The rationalization of literature and the commercialization of
the arts began in the sphere of distribution. Now it reaches
deeper and deeper into the productive aspects. 'We seldom stop
to think,' wrote Henry Seidel Canby, in 1933, Tiow strange it is
that literature has become an industry. . . Everything is taken
care of ... in the widely ramified organizations [of] the pub-
lishing houses and the agencies . . . [the author's] name is down
. . . and the diplomacy department dispatches bright young en-
\oys to them at brisk intervals. They are part of the organization
now.' So also the book editors, who increasingly become members
of a semi-anonymous staflF governed by formula, rather than de-
voted, professional men.
Editors seek out prominent names, and men with such names
crave even more prominence; given go-getting editors and crav-
ing notables, it is inevitable in our specialized age that reliance
on the expert should bring about a large expansion of ghost-writ-
ing. The chance is probably fifty-fifty that the book of a prom-
inent but non-literary man is actually written by someone else.
Yet perhaps the ghost-writer is among the honest literary men;
in him alienation from work reaches the final point of complete
lack of pubhc responsibility.
Although the large universities are still relatively free places
in which to work, the trends that limit independence of intellect
are not absent there. The professor is, after all, an employee,
subject to what this fact involves, and institutional factors select
men and have some influence upon how, when, and upon what
they will work. Yet the deepest problem of freedom for teachers
is not the occasional ousting of a professor, but a vague general
fear— sometimes called 'discretion' and 'good judgment'— which
leads to self-intimidation and finally becomes so habitual that the
scholar is unaware of it. The real restraints are not so much ex-
ternal prohibitions as manipulative control of the insurgent by
the agreements of academic gentlemen. Such control is, of course,
152 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
furthered by Hatch Acts, by political and business attacks upon
professors, by the restraints nece^arily involved in Army pro-
grams for colleges, and by the setting up of committees by trade
associations, which attempt to standardize the content and eflFects
of teaching in given disciplines. Research in social science is in-
creasingly dependent upon funds from foundations, which are
notably averse to scholars who develop unpopular, 'unconstruc-
tive,' theses.
The United States' growing international entanglements have
still other, subtle effects upon American intellectuals: for the
young man who teaches and writes on Latin America, Asia, or
Europe, and who does not deviate from acceptable facts and
policies, these entanglements lead to a kind of voluntary cen-
sorship. He hopes for opportunities of research, travel, and
foundation subsidies. Tacitly, by his silence, or explicitly in his
work, the academic intellectual often sanctions illusions that up-
hold authority, rather than speak out against them. In his teach-
ing, he may censor himself by carefully selecting safe problems
in the name of pure science, or by selling such prestige as his
scholarship may have for ends other than his own.
More and more people, and among them the intellectuals, are
becoming dependent salaried workers who spend the most alert
hours of their lives being told what to do. In our time, dominated
by the need for swift action, the individual, including the free
intellectual, feels dangerously lost; such are the general frustra-
tions of contemporary life. But they are reflected very acutely,
in direct and many indirect ways, into the world of the intellec-
tual. For he lives by communication, and the means of effective
communication are being expropriated from the intellectual
worker.
Knowledge that is not communicated has a way of turning
the mind sour, of being obscured, and finally of being forgotten.
For the sake of the integrity of the discoverer, his discovery must
be effectively communicated. Such communication is also a neces-
sary element in the very search for clear understanding, includ-
ing the understanding of one's self. Only through social confirma-
tion by others whom he believes adequately equipped can a man
earn the right of feeling secure in his knowledge. The basis of
BRAINS, INC. 153
integrity can be gained or renewed only by activity, including
communication, in which there is a minimum of repression. When
a man sells the lies of others he is also selling himself. To sell
himself is to turn himself into a commodity, A commodity does
not control the market; its nominal worth is determined by what
the market will offer.
3. The Ideological Demand
The market, though it is undoubtedly a buyer's market, has been
paying off well. The demand of the bureaucracies has been not
only for intellectual personnel to run the new technical, editorial,
and communication machinery, but for the creation and diffusion
of new symbolic fortifications for the new and largely private
powers these bureaucracies represent. In our time, every interest,
hatred, or passion is likely to be intellectually organized, no
matter how low the level of that organization may be. There is
a great 'increase of conscious formulation,' Lionel Trilling re-
marks, and an 'increase of a certain kind of consciousness by
formulation.' Around each interest a system is made up, a system
founded on Science. A research cartel must be engaged or, if
none yet exists, created, in which careful researchers must turn
out elaborate studies and accurately timed releases, buttressing
the interest, competing with other hatreds, turning pieties into
theologies, passions into ideologies. In all these attempts to
secure attention and credulity, in all this justifying and denying,
intellectuals are required. The great demand for new justifica-
tions has been facilitated by four interrelated and cumulative
processes:
I. Traditional sanctifications have in the course of modern
times been broken up; no longer are underlying meanings tacitly
accepted. With the new, diverse, and enlarged means of com-
munication, traditional symbols have been uprooted and ex-
posed to competition. In this breakup, the intellectual has played
a major role; and as urban society has demanded new heroes
and meanings, it has been the intellectual who has found them
and spread them to mass publics.
154 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
II. As every interest has come to have its ideological apparatus,
and new means of communication have become available, sym-
bols of justification and diversion have multiplied and competed
with one another for the attention of various publics. Continu-
ously in demand as new devices to attract attention and hold it,
symbols become banalized shortly after their release, and the
turnover of appealing symbols must be speeded up. An elaborate
study is outdated when a new one is made the next month. Thus
the continual demand for new ideas— that is, acceptable ideas,
attractive modes of statement of interests, passions, and hatreds.
ra. The very size of the private powers that have emerged
has made it necessary to work out new justifications for their
exercise. Clearly the power of the modern corporation is not
easily justifiable in terms of the simple democratic theory of sov-
ereignty inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Many an intellectual earns a good income because of that fact.
The whole growth of ideological work is based on the need for
the vested interests lodged in the new power centers to be soft-
ened, whitened, blurred, misinterpreted to those who serve the
interests of the bureaucracies inside, and to those in its sphere
outside. Because of the funded wealth and centralized power,
opinions must be funded and centralized into good will, which
must be continually managed and sustained. The men at the
helm of the managerial apparatus derive their self-esteem from
their bureaucracies and hence need intellectuals to compose
suitable myths, about them and it. In their relation to man-
agers new entrepreneurs of various types have had their main
chance; among these are many former intellectuals who have
seen and taken that chance.
In the world of the small entrepreneur, power was decentral-
ized and anonymous; it did not require a systematic ideological
cement. In the new managed society, power is centralized and
only anonymous when it is manipulative; one of the major tasks
of its managers is ideological. Their problem is not easy; their
search for new and compelling justifications might well be
frenzied.
BRAINS, INC. 155
rv. Along with the break up of traditional sanctions, the
speed-up in the competition of symbols, and the rise of new un-
sanctified powers, from the recurrent crises of war and slump
which have beset modem society, deep fears and anxieties have
spread. These have put new urgency into the search for adequate
explanations for everyone directly involved. The middle classes,
both old and new, seen as a bulwark of the new powers, are filled
with anxieties and the need for new opinions of the new world
in which they find themselves, or for diversion from it. It has
been the intellectual's part to divert these intermediary strata
and to keep them oriented in an appropriate manner despite their
anxieties.
When irresponsible decisions prevail and values are not pro-
portionately distributed, universal deception must be practiced
by and for those who make the decisions and who have the most
of what values there are to have. An increasing number of intel-
lectually equipped men and women work within powerful bu-
reaucracies and for the relatively few who do the deciding. If
the intellectual is not directly hired by such an organization, he
seeks by little steps and in self-deceptive as well as conscious
ways, to have his published opinions conform to the limits set by
the organizations and by those who are directly hired. In either
case, the intellectual becomes a mouthpiece. There often seems
to be no areas left between 'outright rebellion and grovelling
sycophancy.'
Perhaps, in due course, intellectuals have at all times been
drawn into line with either popular mentality or ruling class, and
away from the urge to be detached; but now in the middle of the
twentieth century, the recoil from detachment and the falling
into line seem more organized, more solidly rooted in the cen-
tralization of power and its rationalization of modern society as
a whole. If, as never before, intellectuals find it difficult to locate
their masters in the impersonal machineries of authority in which
they work, this, despite the anxieties it may at times cause them,
makes more possible the postures of objectivity and integrity they
continue to fancy.
156 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
4. The Rise of the Technician
The social developments centered upon the rise of bureauc-
racies and the ideological developments centered upon the con-
tinual demands for new justifications have coincided: together
they increasingly determine the social position and ideological
posture of the intellectual.
Busy with the ideological speed-up, the intellectual has readily
taken on the responsibilities of the citizen. In many cases, having
ceased to be in any sense a free intellectual, he has joined the ex-
panding world of those who live off ideas, as administrator, idea-
man, and good-will technician. In class, status, and self-image,
he has become more solidly middle class, a man at a desk, mar-
ried, with children, living in a respectable suburb, his career
pivoting on the selling of ideas, his life a tight little routine, sub-
stituting middle-brow and mass culture for direct experience of
his life and his world, and, above all, becoming a man with a
job in a society where money is supreme.
In such an atmosphere, intellectual activity that does not have
relevance to established money and power is not likely to be
highly valued. In the 'capitalization of the spirit,' as George
Lukacs has remarked, talent and ideology become commodities.
The writing of memoranda, telling others what to do, replaces
the writing of books, telling others how it is. Cultural and intel-
lectual products may be valued as ornaments but do not bring
even ornamental value to their producers. The new pattern sets
the anxious standards of economic value and social honor, mak-
ing it increasingly difficult for such a man to escape the routine
ideological panic of the managerial demiurge.
The scope and energy of these new developments, the spread
of managed communications, and the clutch of bureaucracies
have changed the social position of many intellectuals in America.
Unlike some European countries, especially central and eastern
Europe, the United States has not produced a sizable stratum of
intellectuals, or even professionals, who have been unemployed
long enough or under such conditions as to cause frustration
among them. Unemployment among American intellectuals has
been experienced as a cyclical phenomenon, not, as in some
BRAINS, INC. 157
parts of Europe, as a seemingly permanent condition. The ad-
ministrative expansion of the Hberal state and the enormous
growth of private-interest and communications bureaucracies
have in fact multiphed opportunities for careers. It cannot be
said that the intellectuals have cause for economic alarm, as
yet. In fact, amazing careers have become legends among them.
Having little or none of that resentment and hostility that arose
in many European intellectual circles between the wars, Ameri-
can intellectuals have not, as an articulate group, become
leaders for such discontented mass strata as may have become
politically aware of their discontent. Perhaps they have become
disoriented and estranged, from time to time, but they have not
felt disinherited.
The ascendency of the technician over the intellectual in
America is becoming more and more apparent, and seems to be
taking place without many jolts. The U.S. novelist, artist, politi-
cal writer is very good indeed at the jobs for which he is hired.
'What is fatal to the American writer,' Edmund Wilson has
written, 'is to be brilliant at disgraceful or second-rate jobs . . .
with the kind of American writer who has had no education to
speak of, you are unable to talk at all once Hollywood or Luce
has got him.' No longer, in Matthew Josephson's language, 'de-
tached from the spirit of immediate gain,' no longer having a
'sense of being disinterested,' the intellectual is becoming a
technician, an idea-man, rather than one who resists the envi-
ronment, preserves the individual type, and defends himself
from death-by-adaptation.
The intellectual who remains free may continue to learn more
and more about modern society, but he finds the centers of
political initiative less and less accessible. This generates a
malady that is particularly acute in the intellectual who be-
lieved his thinking would make a difference. In the world of
today the more his knowledge of affairs grows, the less impact
his thinking seems to have. If he grows more frustrated as his
knowledge increases, it seems that knowledge leads to power-
lessness. He comes to feel helpless in the fundamental sense
that he cannot control what he is able to foresee. This is not
158 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
only true of his own attempts to act; it is true of the acts of
powerful men whom he observes.
Such frustration arises, of course, only in the man who feels
compelled to act. The 'detached spectator' does not feel his
helplessness because he never tries to surmount it. But the po-
litical man is always aware that while events are not in his
hands he must bear their consequences. He finds it increasingly
diflBcult even to express himself. If he states public issues as he
sees them, he cannot take seriously the slogans and confusions
used by parties with a chance to win power. He therefore feels
politically irrelevant. Yet if he approaches public issues realis-
tically,' that is, in terms of the major parties, he inevitably so
compromises their initial statement that he is not able to sustain
any enthusiasm for political action and thought.
The political failure of nerve thus has a personal counterpart
in the development of a tragic sense of life, which may be ex-
perienced as a personal discovery and a personal burden, but
is also a reflection of objective circumstances. It arises from the
fact that at the fountainheads of public decision there are pow-
erful men who do not themselves suffer the violent results of
their own decisions. In a world of big organizations the lines
between powerful decisions and grass-roots democratic controls
become blurred and tenuous, and seemingly irresponsible ac-
tions by individuals at the top are encouraged. The need for
action prompts them to take decisions into their own hands,
while the fact that they act as parts of large corporations or
other organizations blurs the identification of personal responsi-
bility. Their public views and political actions are, in this objec-
tive meaning of the word, irresponsible: the social corollary of
their irresponsibility is the fact that others are dependent upon
them and must suffer the consequence of their ignorance and
mistakes, their self-deceptions and biased motives. The sense of
tragedy in the intellectual who watches this scene is a personal
reaction to the politics and economics of collective irresponsi-
bility.
The shaping of the society he lives in and the manner in
which he lives in it are increasingly political. That shaping has
come to include the realms of intellect and of personal morality,
which are now also subject to organization. Because of the ex-
BRAINS, INC. 159
panded reach of politics, it is his own personal style of life and
reflections he is thinking about when he thinks about politics.
The independent artist and intellectual are among the few
remaining personalities presumably equipped to resist and to
fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively
things. Fresh perception now involves the capacity to unmask
and smash the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which
modern communications swamp us. The worlds of mass-art and
mass-thought are increasingly geared to the demands of power.
That is why it is in politics that some intellectuals feel the need
for solidarity and for a fulcrum. If the thinker does not relate
himself to the value of truth in political struggle, he cannot re-
sponsibly cope with the whole of live experience.
As the channels of communication become more and more
monopolized, and party machines and economic pressures,
based on vested shams, continue to monopolize the chances of
effective political organization, the opportunities to act and to
communicate politically are minimized. The political intellec-
tual is, increasingly, an employee living off the communication
machineries which are based on the very opposite of what he
would like to stand for.
Just as the bright young technicians and editors cannot face
politics except as news and entertainment, so the remaining
free intellectuals increasingly withdraw; the simple fact is that
they lack the will. The external and internal forces that move
them away from politics are too strong; they are pulled into the
technical machinery, the explicit rationalization of intellect, or
they go the way of personal lament.
Today there are many forms of escape for the free intellec-
tuals from the essential facts of defeat and powerlessness,
among them the cult of alienation and the fetish of objectivity.
Both hide the fact of powerlessness and at the same time at-
tempt to make that fact more palatable.
'Alienation,' as used in middle-brow circles, is not the old de-
tachment of the intellectual from the popular tone of life and its
structure of domination; it does not mean estrangement from
the ruling powers; nor is it a phase necessary to the pursuit of
truth. It is a lament and a form of collapse into self-indulgence.
160 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
It is a personal excuse for lack of political will. It is a fashion-
able way of being overwhelmed. In function, it is the literary
counterpart to the cult of objectivity in the social sciences.
Objectivity or Scientism is often an academic cult of the nar-
rowed attention, the pose of the technician, or the aspiring tech-
nician, who assumes as given the big framework and the politi-
cal meaning of his operation within it. Often an unimaginative
use of already plotted routines of life and work, 'objectivity'
may satisfy those who are not interested in politics; but it is a
specialized form of retreat rather than the intellectual orienta-
tion of a political man.
Both alienation and objectivity fall in line with the victory of
the technician over the intellectual. They are fit moods and ideol-
ogies for intellectuals caught up in and overwhelmed by the
managerial demiurge in an age of organized irresponsibility; sig-
nals that 'the job,' as sanction and as censorship, has come to
embrace the intellectual; and that the political psychology of
the scared employee has become relevant to understanding his
work. Simply to understand, or to lament alienation— these are
the ideals of the technician who is powerless and estranged but
not disinherited. These are the ideals of men who have the
capacity to know the truth but not the chance, the skill, or the
fortitude, as the case may be, to communicate it with political
efiFectiveness.
The defeat of the free intellectuals and the rationalization of
the free intellect have been at the hands of an enemy who
cannot be clearly defined. Even given the power, the free intel-
lectuals could not easily find the way to work their will upon
their situation, nor could they succeed in destroying its effect
upon what they are, what they do, and what they want to be-
come. They find it harder to locate their external enemies than
to grapple with their internal conditions. Their seemingly im-
personal defeat has spun a personally tragic plot and they are
betrayed by what is false within them.
8
The Great Salesroom
In the world of the small entrepreneur, selling was one activity
among many, limited in scope, technique, and manner. In the
new society, selling is a pervasive activity, unlimited in scope
and ruthless in its choice of technique and manner.
The salesman's world has now become everybody's world,
and, in some part, everybody has become a salesman. The en-
larged market has become at once more impersonal and more
intimate. What is there that does not pass through the market?
Science and love, virtue and conscience, friendliness, carefully
nurtured skills and animosities? This is a time of venality. The
market now reaches into every institution and every relation.
The bargaining manner, the huckstering animus, the memorized
theology of pep, the commercialized evaluation of personal
traits— they are all around us; in public and in private there is
the tang and feel of salesmanship.
1. Types of Salesmen
The American Salesman has gone through several major
phases, each of which corresponds to a phase in the organiza-
tion of the business system. This system is a vast and intricate
network of institutions, each strand of which is a salesman of one
sort or another. Any change in this system and of its relations to
society as a whole will be reflected in the development of types
of salesmen and of the kind of salesmanship that prevails.
When demand was generally greater than production, selling
161
162 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
occurred largely in a seller's market, and was in the main a more
or less effortless matter of being in a certain place at a certain
time in order to take an order. When demands balanced supplies
the salesman as a means of distribution merely provided infor-
mation. But when the pressure from the producer to sell became
much greater than the capacity of the consumer to buy, the role
of the salesman shifted into high gear. In the twentieth century,
as surpluses piled up, the need has been for distribution to
national markets; and with the spread of national advertising, co-
extensive sales organizations have been needed to cash in on its
effects.
When business firms were able to increase their output in an
enlarging market, they could conveniently underbid one another;
but in a contracted or closed market, they prefer not to compete
in terms of price. It may be that lower prices, as many econo-
mists hold, are 'more effective . . . than the . . . methods of
"aggressive"— and cost-increasing— salesmanship.' But in its way
high-pressure selling is a substitute stimulator of demand, not by
lowering prices but by creating new wants and more urgent de-
sires. 'The business,' wrote Veblen, 'reduces itself to a traffic in
salesmanship, running wholly on the comparative merit of . . .
the rival salesmen.' Salesmanship in the United States has been
made into a virtually autonomous force dependent only upon
will, which keeps the economy in high-gear operation.
In the older world of the small entrepreneur there were store-
keepers but few salesmen. After the Revolutionary War, there
began to be traveling peddlers, whose markets were thin but
widespread. By the middle of the nineteenth century the whole-
saler—then the dominant type of entrepreneur— began to hire
drummers or greeters, whose job it was to meet retailers and
jobbers in hotels or saloons in the market centers of the city.
Later, these men began to travel to the local markets. Then, as
manufacturers replaced wholesalers as dominant powers in the
world of business, their traveling agents joined the wholesalers.
Goods produced in the factory are transported to urban centers
of consumption; there they pile up, and are unpiled into the
market radius of the city. Without mass production, commodities
cannot be accumulated to fill great stores. Without big cities
THE GREAT SALESROOM 163
there are no markets large enough and concentrated enough to
support such stores. Without a transportation net, the goods
produced cannot be picked up at scattered points and placed in
the middle of the urban mass. Each of these is a center of the
modern web-work of business and society.
On the other hand, the same conditions also make possible the
smaller specialty shop— shops that sell only gloves or ties. In the
history of modern trade, N. S. B. Gras observes, there seems to
be a sort of oscillation between specialization and integration.
An enterprise may specialize in terms of the lines of commodi-
ties that it handles, or in terms of the junctures of the economic
circuit that it serves. It may handle many lines of merchandise
or few; it may retail, wholesale, and manufacture, or it may per-
form only one of these functions. The oscillation of modern enter-
prise between specialization and integration involves lines of
merchandise as well as economic functions. With some simplifica-
tion, the historical rhythm of enterprise, as it involves the Ameri-
can store, may be outlined in this way: (1) In the eighteenth
century, the market was small-scale and the ways of reaching it
were primitive. There was little specialization and the small gen-
eral store prevailed. (2) In the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, specialization proceeded; by the mid years of the century
the cities were full of specialty shops, each focusing on a narrow
area of the enlarging market. They were mainly retail, and were
advised, in the business lore of the time, to stick each to its own
economic function. (3) For the last hundred years, the amalga-
mating, integrating tendency, of which the department store is a
prime exemplar, has been on the upswing.
There are still trading posts in outlying areas, and general mer-
chandise stores. Single-line or specialty shops still numerically
dominate U.S. retailing. But the department store, the chain
store, the mail order house— all principally types of this century-
are most in tune with the new society.
Dependent as the economy is upon replacement markets and
rapid turnover, obsolescence must be planned into the commodi-
ties produced, speeded up by the technique of marketing. The
needs of salesmanship are thus geared even to the design of
164 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
commodities; the chief concern of the industrial designers, the
great packagers, is the appearance of commodities, changing
colors, shapes, and names. The whole of fashion, not only in
clothing, automobiles, and furniture, but in virtually all com-
modities, is deliberately managed to the end of greater sales
volume. Fashion has become a rational attempt to exploit the
status market for a greater turnover of goods. Behind the $126.3
billion worth of goods U.S. consumers bought in 1948 there lie
not only the economic facts of need and exchange, but the social
fact that U.S. society has in crucial aspects become a continuous
fashion show.
The shift in economic emphasis from production to distribution
has meant both the persistence of the old urban middle class,
which is now located in distribution, and the expansion of con-
siderable portions of the new middle class. Of the old middle
class 19 per cent are directly involved in retail and wholesale
selling. They are not captains of industry, but corporals of re-
tailing. In the meantime, the era of big retailing has brought
forth over 3 million white-collar people who are now directly
involved in selling; in 1940, they were 6 per cent of the labor
force, 14 per cent of the total middle class, 25 per cent of all
white-collar people.
In terms of skills involved, sales personnel range from the sales-
men who create and satisfy new desires, through salespeople who
do not create desires or customers but wait for them, to the order-
fillers who merely receive payment, make change, and wrap up
what is bought. Some salesmen must know the technical details
of complex commodities and their maintenance; others need
know nothing about the simple commodities they sell.
In terms of social level, at the top of the sales hierarchy are the
Prima Donna Vice-Presidents of corporations, who boast that
they are merely salesmen, and at the bottom, the five-and-ten-
cent-store girls who work for half days several months before
they leave the job market for marriage. Near the top of the hier-
archy are the Distribution Executives who design, organize, and
direct the selling techniques of salesforces. Close to them are the
absentee salesmen who create the slogans and images that spur
sales from a distance by mass media.
THE GREAT SALESROOM 165
In terms of where the sale is made, salespeople may be classi-
fied as stationary, mobile, or absentee. Stationary salespeople—
now about 60 per cent of the white-collar people involved in
selling— sell in stores, behind the counters. Mobile salesmen— now
about 38 per cent— make the rounds to the houses and offices of
the customers. They range from peddlers walking from door-to-
door, to 'commercial travelers' who fly to their formal appoint-
ments expertly made weeks in advance. Absentee salesmen— ad
men, now 2 per cent of all salespeople— manage the machineries
of promotion and advertising and are not personally present at
the point of the sale, but act as all-pervasive adjuncts to those
who are.
The national market has become an object upon which many
white-collar skills focus: the professional market researcher ex-
amines it intensively and extensively; the personnel man selects
and trains salesmen of a thousand different types for its exploita-
tion; the manager studies the fine art of prompting men to 'go
get 'em/ As competition for restricted markets builds up, and
buyers' markets become more frequent, the pressure mounts in
the salesman's immediate domain. Psychologists bend their minds
to improving the technique of persuading people to commercial
decisions. Before high-pressure salesmanship, emphasis was upon
the salesmen's knowledge of the product, a sales knowledge
grounded in apprenticeship; after it, the focus is upon hypnotiz-
ing the prospect, an art provided by psychology.
The salesmen link up one unit of business society with another;
salesmanship is coextensive with the cash nexus of the modem
world. It is not only a marketing device, it is a pervasive ap-
paratus of persuasion that sets a people's style of life. For all
types of marketing-entrepreneurs and white-collar salespeople,
in and out of stores, on the roads and in the air, are only the con-
centration points in the cadre of salesmanship. So deeply have
they infiltrated, so potent is their influence, that they may be
seen as a sort of oflBcial personnel of an all-pervasive atmosphere.
That is why we cannot understand salesmanship by studying
only salesmen. The American premium, we learn in Babbitt, is
not upon 'selling anything in particular for or to anybody in par-
ticular, but pure selling.' Now, salesmanship has become an
abstracted value, a science, an ideology and a style of life for a
166 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
society that has turned itself into a fabulous salesroom and be-
become the biggest bazaar in the world.
2. The Biggest Bazaar in the World *
Fifty years ago, the Big Bazaar moved uptown to become one
of the hubs of the megalopolis. When it moved, thirty-two build-
ings, housing smaller and less independent establishments, had
to be knocked down. Everybody said it was the biggest and the
best bazaar in the world.
Its twenty-three acres of floor, each a square block, were built
for ups and downs as well as for cross-floor movement. The esca-
lators alone could lift and sink 40,000 people every hour. And
all day long, folded money and slips of paper were shot through
eighteen miles of brass tubing to end in the cartellized brain, the
office center of the big bazaar.
Then, alongside the first square block, they built again and
still again, the additions rearing up to dwarf the old beginning.
Now there are almost fifty acres of floor, and off the island of
Manhattan, there are thirty more acres where men and commodi-
ties wait to move in on the biggest bazaar in the world.
Now there are 58 escalators, 29 elevators, and 105 conveyer
belts; 26 freight lifts whisk loaded trucks from floor to floor; 75
miles of tubing carry the records of who bought it, who sold it,
what it was, how much was paid, when did all this happen.
Still it cannot be contained: it reaches out to Ohio and San
Francisco, to Alabama, Chicago, Rochester; it is a chain of chains
of departments. And deep in its heart, they have a professional
staff and ten clerks who sit every day figuring out the portentous
question: Where will the next one be planted?
One hundred and eighty incoming telephones keep one hun-
dred operators politely tired. If you can't come, phone; we also
deliver. Out from the bazaar for fifty miles, our four hundred
and ten vans carry the bazaar into your very home, leaving a
little part of itself, making it a part of you.
' The typological statement in sections 2 and 3, which is modeled
on large middle-class department stores in big cities, draws heavily
upon Ralph M. Hower's excellent History of Macy's of New York,
1859-1919 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943).
THE GREAT SALESROOM 167
Do you think the family is important to society? But the Big
Bazaar feeds, clothes, amuses; it replaces famihes, in every re-
spect but the single one of biological reproduction. From womb
to grave, it watches over you, supplying the necessities and creat-
ing the unmet need. Back in the 'nineties, the Bazaar had begun
to speak as the Universal Provider: 'Follow the crowd and it will
always take/you to/ (The Big Bazaar). . . /The All Around
Store. . . /Ride our bicycles,/ read our books, cook in our sauce-
pans,/ dine oflF our china, wear our silks,/ get under our blankets,
smoke our cigars,/ drink our wines . . . / and life will Cost
You Less and Yield You More/Than You Dreamed Possible.'
Do you think factories are something to know about? But the
Bazaar is a factory: it has taken unto itself the several phases of
the economic circuit, and now contains them all. And it is also
a factory of smiles and visions, of faces and dreams of life, sur-
rounding people with the commodities for which they live, hold-
ing out to them the goals for which they struggle. What factory
is geared so deep and direct with what people want and what
they are becoming? Measured by space or measured by money,
it is the greatest emporium in the world: it is a world— dedicated
to commodities, run by committees and paced by floor-walkers.
It is hard to say who owns the Bazaar. It began when a petty
capitalist left whaling ships for retail trade. Then it became a
family business; some partners appeared, and they took over;
now it is a corporation, and nobody owns more than 10 per cent.
From a single proprietor to what, in the curious lingo of finance,
is called the public. The eldest son of an eldest son has a lot of
say-so about its workings, but if he went away, nobody doubts
that it would go on: it is self-creative and self-perpetuating and
nobody owns it.
But who runs it? Someone has to run it. At first one person did
—knew all about it and owned it and ran it. Once a week this
merchant stood in the middle of his store and read impressively
and out loud the name of the clerk who had sold the most during
the past week. From where he stood, he could see all the opera-
tions in each department of his store. But now there is no mer-
chant and no place for such a merchant to stand, now a hundred
168 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
people do what that man did. What one of them does is often
secret to the others. It has become so impersonal at the top and
bottom that a major problem is how to make it personal again,
and still smooth-running and continuous.
There are managers of this and managers of that, and there
are managers of managers, but when any one of them dies or dis-
appears, it doesn't make any difference. The store goes on. It
was created by people who did not know what they were creat-
ing; and now it creates people, who in turn do not know what
they are creating. Every hour of the day it creates and destroys
and re-creates itself, nobody knowing about it all but somebody
knowing about every single part of it.
So the chaos you see is only apparent: nothing haphazard
happens here. Things are under control; everything is accounted
for; it is all in the files, and the committees know about the files,
and other committees know about those committees.
In the cathedral, worship is organized; this is the cathedral of
commodities, whispering and shouting for its 394,000 assorted
gods (not including colors and sizes). In organizing the congre-
gation, the Big Bazaar has been training it for faster and more
eflBcient worship. Its most effective prayers have been formed in
the ritual of the Great Repetition, a curious blending of piety
and the barking of the circus.
The gods men worship determine how they live. Gods have
always changed, but never before has their change been so well
or so widely organized; never before has their worship been so
universal and so devout. In organizing the fetishism of com-
modities, the Big Bazaar has made gods out of flux itself. Fashion
used to be something for uptown aristocrats, and had mainly to
do with deities of dress. But the Big Bazaar has democratized
the idea of fashion to all orders of commodities and for all classes
of worshipers. Fashion means faster turnover, because if you
worship the new, you will be ashamed of the old. In its benevo-
lence, the Big Bazaar has built the rhythmic worship of fashion
into the habits and looks and feeUngs of the urban mass: it has
organized the imagination itself. In dressing people up and
changing the scenery of their lives, on the street and in the bed-
THE GREAT SALESROOM 169
room, it has cultivated a great faith in the Rehgion of Appear-
ance.
Before the age of the Big Bazaar, these gods had no large-
scale evangelist. The old fair and the little shop sat passive and
still. Before there were quiet little notices, like those for birth
or death, in close lines, somberly announcing what was available.
But the Big Bazaar is the continuous evangelist for 394,000 com-
modities; every day it tempts 137,000 women; while 11,000 em-
ployees fill their ears with incantations, their innermost eyes with
visions.
3. Buyers and Floorwalkers
The department store is not a continuation of the old general
store, but a synthesis of general store and specialty shop. Fairs
in the medieval West and bazaars in the Orient were many little
shops under one roof, each under its own management and the
total but a passing combination. The old general store was small
and not organized by departments; peddlers grew up to become
Woolworths, not Macy's. None of these quasi-prototypes pro-
vided the 'liberal services' that the department store often pro-
vides: free delivery, charge account, the return privilege, free
rest room, information service.
The modem department store is a congeries of little hierarch-
ies, which in turn sum up to the store as a whole. It is a curious
blend of decentralized organs and intricate centralizing nerves.
Departments are organized along commodity lines, each with its
own managers, all knit firmly together by a financial and person-
nel network. By watching the running balance of outgo and
yield, the accounting system keeps alert to the work of each
department. The big store is departmentalized by commodities
and centralized by accounting.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the owners or
their top managers worked through a superintendent, who was
in charge of the placement of employees, the movement of goods,
and general maintenance. Below him and his office's circle, mana-
gerial responsibility ran along merchandise lines, each depart-
ment keeping its own accounts.
170 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
At the head of each department was a buyer, who was re-
sponsible for what was for sale at any given time, the manner in
which it was sold, the terms and the turnover of goods, and the
resultant profits.
Alongside the buyer, who handled merchandise and money,
was the floorwalker, who handled customers and salesclerks. His
language was the language of service, his aim the union for profit
of customer and clerk. The floorwalker-manager, now often
known as a service or section manager, watched the clerks and
the cash girls, served as timekeeper, checked the employees in
and out of the store, enforced a disciplined politeness, and, as
an expert at softening complaints, approved or rejected refunds
and exchanges.
Relations between buyers and floorwalkers were not always
cordial. It was the floorwalker's consistent 'care not to displease
the all-powerful and often crotchety buyers.' Formally, the top
superintendent was supposed to hire and fire salespeople, the
floorwalker 'to keep them in order.' But actually, 'the buyer's
voice was usually the deciding one.' Since he was responsible for
the turnover of goods at a profit, he directed the selling opera-
tions of his department. The buyer was the point of intersection
between the rules of the bureaucracy and the chance calculation
of the unrationalized market.
By 1900, with many departments in the store, the firm began
to bring in a new type of personnel, men and women trained in
colleges rather than in little retail shops; bookkeeping became
a tool for the systematic analysis of operations, rather than mere
historical record. Committees began to co-ordinate, operations
were standardized, all under a control from above. In this cen-
tralization, the authority of the buyer, although not his responsi-
bility, has been minimized. As a result, the buyer often becomes
a pocket of anxiety, often being blamed 'if the departmental
operations were considered unsatisfactory, even if the trouble
was actually beyond his control.'
By World War I, the department store was almost entirely run
by central plan, the execution of which was watched and checked
by central agents. Buyers were managed through a social club,
the 'Managers' Association; a 'Board of Operations' and an 'Ad-
visory Council,' containing all top people, further completed the
THE GREAT SALESROOM 171
bureaucratic reorganization, 'so that it would function continu-
ously without depending upon the presence of any one person.'
By a series of small developments, the Controller's OfBce began
to allocate expenses, direct and indirect, to each buyer and his
department, to take over more and more decisions. The buyer
was watched, coached, and ordered by committees and boards;
his decisions about the merchandise were expropriated. No
longer the lord of a small domain in feudahsm, the buyer became
a higher-salaried employee in a bureaucracy.
The floorwalker, too, like the industrial foreman, began to lose
many of his functions, in particular the training of new sales-
people. By 1915 a separate training organization, which taught
the rules of the store and the merchandise to be handled, was
set up. No longer did the floorwalker preside over small weekly
staff meetings in each department, where 'matters of store disci-
pline, courtesy to customer, and related topics' were discussed.
In 1911, the Board of Operations, analyzing its statistics, 'of-
fered clerks ten cents for every error they detected in credit slips
made out by floorwalkers. . .'
In the 'nineties, the middle management of buyers and floor-
walkers and other minor executives often seemed to be 'poorly
educated and hardened by failure and adversity,' and according
to some contemporary observers, even 'never wholly reliable,
constantly shifting from one store to another in search of a "real
opportunity" which could never materialize for them, they often
sought consolation in the bottle. Indeed, one of the management's
problems in this period was the buyer or floorwalker who went
out to lunch and failed to return or came back too drunk to be
tolerated on the selling floor. At least one young clerk won pro-
motion through his ability to act as substitute on such occasions,'
thus confirming the linkage of virtue and success.
But in the twentieth century, the 'scientific selection and train-
ing of personnel' replaced haphazard hiring as the store began
systematically 'to seek college graduates as material for the or-
ganization they were building'; and to expand the training pro-
gram for these employees, so as to draw from their own care-
fully selected ranks people for higher positions. After World
War I, this new personnel program replaced the old pattern of
employing executives from other, usually smaller, establishments,
172 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
where they had acquired merchandising experience. Before, the
'primary qualification for the job was merchandise experience';
now, the prerequisites were 'formal training and general cul-
tural background/ College people, entering the store when rela-
tively young, can be provided with the experience necessary for
higher posts. Today, 'A large proportion of the executives . . .
are persons who were selected and trained 15 or 20 years ago
for the very positions they now hold.'
The department store has thus built into itself a career pattern;
it selects appHcants carefully on each level; then its own ele-
vators grind slowly upward with them, ascent being made pos-
sible by death and turnover and being impelled by individual'
ambition. The files of the personnel manager and the accounts
of the controller's ofiBce have replaced the store-to-store jumping
and the chances on the open market.
4. The Salesgirls
One of the most crucial changes in the work-life of salesgirls
over the last decades is the shift in their relation to customers.
What has occurred may be gauged by comparing the outlook of
(i) salespeople in small and middle-sized cities, with (n) sales-
girls in big metropolitan stores.
I. Salespeople, as well as small merchants in the small city,
are often proud to say that they know well most of the people
they serve. Their work satisfactions spring directly from this ex-
perience of the personally known market, from a communaliza-
tion not with their superiors or bosses, but with the customers.
In the small towns, salespeople feel they are learning human
nature at a gossip center. 'I like meeting the public; it broadens
your views on life,' one saleslady in her late fifties in a medium-
sized jewehy store says. 'I would not take anything for the
knowledge I have gained of human nature through my contacts
as a saleslady.' This theme of 'learning about human nature' is
explicitly connected with the small, personally known character
of the market. Again, the comments of a forty-year-old clerk in
a small grocery store: 'Meeting the people, I actually make
friends in a neighborhood store, because I know their family
THE GREAT SALESROOM 173
problems as well as their likes and dislikes,' and, 'I gain from
my customers . . . confidences which brings a certain satisfac-
tion in being of help.'
Both salesladies in department stores and women owners of
small stores borrow prestige from customers. One saleslady in a
medium-sized department store says: 1 like most meeting the
public and being associated with the type of customer with whom
I come in contact. The majority of my customers are very high
type; they are refined and cultured.' A few of the salespeople
also borrow prestige from the stores in which they work, some
even from handling the merchandise itself. 'I like the displays
and the connection with fine china and silverware.'
The power to change people, an attitude that may be consid-
ered the opposite of borrowing prestige from the customer, also
permits satisfaction. 'I like the satisfaction I secure in my work
in improving my customer's appearance,' says a cosmetic-counter
woman of about forty. T have some very homely customers, as
far as physical features are concerned, whom I have transformed
into very attractive women.'
Many salespeople try to bring out the human aspect of their
work by expressing an ideology of 'service.' This ideology is often
anchored (1) in the feeling of being worth while: Tt is a pleas-
ure to serve them. It makes you feel you are necessary and doing
something worth while'; (2) in the borrowing of prestige from
customers; (3) in the feeling of gaining knowledge of human
nature; (4) in the tacit though positive identification with the
store itself or with its owner. Such elements form the occupa-
tional ideology of salespeople in smaller cities; each rests upon
and assumes a small and personally known market— the aspect
of their work that is primarily responsible for the main features
of their ideology. For the emphasis upon the Tiandling of people'
brings to the fore precisely the experience that wage and factory
workers do not have.
u. Salesgirls in large department stores of big cities often
attempt to borrow prestige from customers, but in the big store
of strangers, the attempt often fails, and, in fact, sometimes
boomerangs into a feeling of powerless depression. The hatred
of customers, often found in an intense form, is one result; the
174 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
customer becomes the chief target of hostihty; for she is an osten-
sible source of irritation, and usually a safe target.
Salesgirls in the big city store may be possessive of their own
'regular customers' and jealous of other's, but still when wealthier
customers leave the store there is often much pulldown' talk
about them, and obvious envy. 'The main thing we talk about,'
says a salesgirl, 'is the customers. After the customers go we
mimic them.' Salesgirls often attempt identification with custom-
ers but often are frustrated. One must say 'attempt' identification
because: (1) Most customers are strangers, so that contact is
brief. (2) Class differences are frequently accentuated by the
sharp and depressing contrast between home and store, customer,
or commodity. 'You work among lovely things which you can't
buy, you see prosperous, comfortable people who can buy it.
When you go home with your [low pay] you do not feel genteel
or anything but humiliated. You either half starve on your own
or go home to mama, as I do, to be supported.' (3) Being 'at
their service,' 'waiting on them,' is not conducive to easy and
gratifying identification. Caught at the point of intersection be-
tween big store and urban mass, the salesgirl is typically en-
grossed in seeing the customer as her psychological enemy, rather
than the store as her economic enemy.
Today salesgirls for big stores are selected from hundreds of
thousands of applicants, who are chiefly women between 18 and
30 years of age. Some are merely waiting to marry; others are
older women without marriage prospects; some are permanent
full-time employees; others are temporary or part-time. As a
mobile labor market, the department store is not very secure
for the full-time regular worker, broken as it is by the vacation-
ing college girl, the housewife, and the girl just out of high school
still living at home, none of whom must make a regular living.
Out of this variety of women, and the interplay of individual
with the store and the flow of customers, a range of sales per-
sonalities develops. Here is one such typology, based upon
James B. Gale's prolonged and intensive observations in big
stores.
The Wolf prowls about and pounces upon potential cus-
tomers: T go for the customer. . . Why should I wait for them
THE GREAT SALESROOM 175
to come to me when I can step out in the aisles and grab them?
The customers seem to Hke it; it gives them a feehng of impor-
tance. I hke it; it keeps me on my toes, builds up my salesbook
. . . the buyer likes it too. . . Every well-dressed customer,
cranky or not, looks like a five-dollar bill to me.'
Intensified, the wolf becomes The Elbower, who is bent upon
monopolizing all the customers. While attending to one, she
answers the questions of a second, urges a third to be patient,
and beckons to a fourth from the distance. Sometimes she will
literally elbow her sales colleagues out of the way. Often she is
expert in distinguishing the looker or small purchaser from the
big purchaser. 'I had to develop a rough-house technique here
in order to make the necessary commissions. I just couldn't waste
time with people who didn't want to buy but who were just kill-
ing time. And, after all, why waste time? Why should I bother
with the pikers? Let the new clerks cut their teeth on them. Why
waste good selling time with the folks who can't make up their
mind, the ones who want to tell you their life-history, the bargain
wolves, the advice-seekers, and the "I'm just looking" boobs? I
want the women who buy three pairs of shoes at a time, stock-
ings to go with them, and maybe slippers, too. I believe I can
satisfactorily wait on five at a time, and keep them happy, so
I wait on five! Look at my salesbook and note the total for the
first five hours today. Trafiic is good, . .'
The Charmer focuses the customer less upon her stock of
goods than upon herself. She attracts the customer with modu-
lated voice, artful attire, and stance. 'It's really marvelous what
you can do in this world with a streamlined torso and a brilliant
smile. People do things for me, especially men when I give them
that slow smile and look up through my lashes. I found that out
long ago, so why should I bother about a variety of selling tech-
niques when one technique will do the trick? I spend most of my
salary on dresses which accentuate all my good points. After all,
a girl should capitalize on what she has, shouldn't she? And you'll
find the answer in my commission total each week.'
The Ingenue Salesgirl is often not noticed; it is part of her
manner to be self-effacing. Still ill at ease and often homesick,
still confused by trying to apply just-learned rules to apparent
chaos, she finds a way out by attaching herself like a child
176 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
to whoever will provide support. 'Everything here is so big.
There are so many confusing rules. . . A lot of customers scare
me. They expect too much for their money. If it wasn't for Miss B.
I'd have to quit. . . When I make errors, she laughs and straight-
ens me out; she shows me how the cash register runs; and yes-
terday she spoke severely to a customer who was bullying me
. . . Handling so much money and so many sales-checks and re-
membering so many rules; and not being able to wear any pretty
dresses, just blue, grey, black, brown— all this gets me down. At
the end of the day I'm mostly a nervous wreck. Oh, for those
easy days at high school. . .'
The Collegiate, usually on a part-time basis from a local
campus, makes up in her impulsive amateurishness for what she
lacks in professional restraint. Usually she is eager to work and
fresh for the job, a more self-confident type of ingenue.
The Drifter may be found almost anywhere in the big store
except at her assigned post; she is a circulating gossip, concerned
less with customers and commodities than with her colleagues.
When criticized for her style of floor behavior, she replies: 'I'm
different from a lot of the clerks here, and I have a restless energy
driving me all the time. I just can't stay here at my counter like
an elephant chained to a post, day in and day out. I like people;
I have friends all around the floor; and I want to tell them occa-
sionally what I do and think and feel, and listen to their ideas
too. I sell my share, don't I? I have good sales volume, don't I?
I have to move around or I'll go crazy.'
The Social Pretender, well known among salesgirls, attempts
to create an image of herself not in line with her job, usually
inventing a social and family background. She says she is selling
temporarily for the experience, and soon will take up a more glit-
tering career. This may merely amuse her older sales colleagues,
but it often pleases the buyer, who may notice that the social
pretender sometimes attracts wealthy customers to her counter.
A plain-clothes man in a big store said: 'That gal S — O —
amuses me because she's so cute and such a phony too. . . She
poses here as a girl from a well-to-do family who wants to sell
just long enough to catch the selling spirit, then become an
assistant buyer long enough to get a good flair for style, and then
flutter back to her family's gold-plated bosom and on to a wealthy
THE GREAT SALESROOM }77
marriage. She was telling one of her side-kicks there this morn-
ing that she "didn't need the money; this was just an exciting
proletariat experience" for her. Experience, my eye! She needs
the dough and needs it badly or I miss my guess. At that, though,
she gives a damn good imitation of one of those spoiled Park Ave-
nue darlings . . .. keep your eye open for these phonies; you'll
see a couple in every department.'
The Old-Timer, with a decade or more of experience in the
store, becomes either a disgruntled rebel or a completely accom-
modated saleswoman. In either case, she is the backbone of the
salesforce, the cornerstone around which it is built. As a rebel,
the old-timer seems to focus upon neither herself nor her mer-
chandise, but upon the store: she is against its policies, other
personnel, and often she turns her sarcasm and rancor upon the
customer. Many salesgirls claim to hate the store and the cus-
tomers; the rebel enjoys hating them, in fact, she lives off her
hatred, although she can be quick to defend the store to a cus-
tomer. Older women, who have transferred from one department
to another, make up the majority of this type. 'In those days the
customers were nearly all ladies and gentlemen, really different
from these phonies that come in here today from all around.
They scream about the merchandise and scream about the serv-
ice, and I just give 'em a deadpan face and a chilly stare, and
ignore them. When I get good and ready I wait on them. I get
sick of listening to them. I also get tired of hearing talk about
the rules and the regulations; I even get tired of eating the half-
cooked food they toss at me in the cafeteria after standing in
line twenty minutes while [some people] try to decide whether
to have kale or alfalfa for their noon roughage. Yes, there is a lot
of change here, but nothing really new: just the same old rules
and same old stuff about selling approaches and customer types
—old stuff, I say, with different words, more angles, new bosses.
Every boss I ever had here pushed me around until now I take
it almost as a matter of course.' 'The buyer just hates me but I've
been here so long there isn't much he can do about it. As long
as my sales volume keeps up— and it's always been very good— he
can only criticize me on small stuff. Buyers and I never did get
along very well, and I've seen a lot of them come and go. They
want this and then they want that and after that it's something
178 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
else, always carping around about one thing or another. I often
wonder if they believe it themselves. . . They bum me up with
their "new selling techniques" and all the rest of that crap. After
seventeen years here I don't need advice or instruction in selling
ways. They aren't kidding me; I've had their number for years.
The present buyer isn't kidding me either. He goes for youth and
the stream-lined torso. . . To hell with all of them— I work for
me first, last, always; and the customers and the store can take
it and like it. You ask me then why I stay here. I'm not sure I
could do anything else. I get up, I wash and dress and eat, and
I put on my things and come to Macy's. It's almost automatic;
in fact several times I did all that on Sundays, once actually get-
ting as far as the train before I came to and realized it was
Sunday. Just an old fire-horse listening for the bell, that's me.'
The accommodated old-timer has become gentle and com-
placent. T came here, as part-time help, one November in the
Christmas season. I have been very happy here and have never
wanted to leave here or to work in any other store. . . Last year
I got my Twenty-Five-Year-Club pin; it makes me feel like
someone and it looks nice with this blue dress, doesn't it? . . .
That's not bad, is it, for an old lady putting her daughter through
school. This store and my daughter are my whole life. See that
young girl over there. . . She's a new girl, and she reminds me
of my Jennie. I am sponsoring her; you know, teaching her the
ropes, showing her how to get started correctly. I like that; I
sponsor nearly all the new people in the department. I teach
them that we have a fine department in a fine store, and that the
customer is important, because, after all, if it wasn't for the cus-
tomers, none of us would have our nice jobs here.'
5. The Centralization of Salesmanship
Salesmanship seems a frenzied affair of flexibility and pep; the
managerial demiurge, a cold machinery of calculation and plan-
ning. Yet the conflict between them is only on the surface: in
the new society, salesmanship is much too important to be left
to pep alone or to the personal flair of detached salesmen. Since
the first decade of the century, much bureaucratic attention has
been given to the gap between mass production and individual
THE GREAT SALESROOM 179
consumption. Salesmanship is an attempt to fill that gap. In it,
as in material fabrication, large-scale production has been insti-
tuted, in the form of reliable salespeople and willing customers.
The dominant motive has been to lower the costs of selling per
head; the dominant technique, to standardize and rationalize the
processes of salesmanship, not only in the obvious sense of mass
retailing in department stores, but in the technique and organi-
zation of selling everywhere.
In selling, as elsewhere, centralization has meant the expropri-
ation of certain traits previously found in creative salesmen, by a
machinery that codifies these traits and controls their acquisition
and display by individual salesmen. The rise of absentee selling,
rooted in the mass media, has done much to spur these centraliz-
ing and rationalizing trends. From the very beginning, absentee
selling, being expensive, has been in the hands of top manage-
ment, which has had its use studied, probably more carefully
than any other activity in modern society.
In the 1850's, one large store in Philadelphia began to letter
all departments, and to number each row on each shelf. From
the proprietor's desk tubes ran to every department: from each
department, pages ran with parcels and money and bills to the
cashier's cage and back to the seller's counter. No salesperson
needed to leave his station; from his position at the center, the
proprietor could, at any time, a contemporary observer states,
'form a just estimate of the relative value of the services of each,
in proportion to his salary,' and thus 'to speak understandingly of
the capabilities and business qualities of any of his employees.' In
New York, at about the same time, a proprietor wrote: 'There is
but one mark on the Goods, and that is the selling mark, and no
clerk in my store knows any other mark but that.' This meant that
both clerk and customer were expropriated of higgling and bar-
gaining.
All along the line, the entrepreneurial aspects of the sales-
clerk's role have been expropriated by the rationalized division
of labor. If the entrepreneur himself does not sell, he has to
have one price; he cannot trust clerks to bargain successfully.
One-price is part of the bureaucratization of salesmanship. It also
180 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
is fair to the customer, who is also bureaucratized and cannot
higgle. All are equal before the machine of salesmanship, and
things are under control.
The detached creative salesman is disappearing and the man
who is taking his place is neither detached nor so creative in the
old sense. Small-scale retailing, of course, continues with its
handicraft methods of creating and maintaining the customer,
but in the big store, and on the road, the role of the individual
salesperson has been circumscribed and standardized in every
possible feature, and thus the salesperson has been made highly
replaceable. The old 'manufacturer's representative,' who sold to
retailers and wholesalers, was supervised very little; he was on
his own in manner and even in territory. The new commercial
traveler is one unit in an elaborate marketing organization. What
he says and what he can't say is put down for him in his sales
manual. Even though he feels that he is a man with a proposition
looking for someone to tie it to, his very presentation of propo-
sition, product, and self is increasingly given to him, increasingly
standardized and tested. Sales executives, representing the force
that is centralizing and rationalizing salesmanship, have moved
to the top levels of the big companies. The brains in salesman-
ship, the personal flair, have been centralized from scattered indi-
viduals and are now managed by those who standardize and test
the presentation which the salesmen memorize and adapt.
It used to be, and still is in many cases, that the man on the
road could become a virtual prima donna of the organization:
in the end the success of the business depended on him and if
he could capture a given set of important customers he might
high-jack his company with the threat of taking himself and
these customers to another company. Rationalization is in part
an attempt to meet this threat. The vice president of one large
company, in speaking of the status and power of such salesmen
and the threat they may come to have over a company, says:
'The first thing I'm going to do is to make up a presentation, with
clear charts and telling slogans. Maybe it will be a turnover
booklet, maybe even a sound film. Then I'm going to hire me a
bunch of salaried men and teach them how to show this presen-
tation. They can still get in the personal adaptation of it to dif-
THE GREAT SALESROOM 181
ferent clients they're handling, but they will damn well give that
presentation the way I want it given and there's not going to
be any high-priced prima-donna stuff about that. I'll pay plenty
to have the presentation made and tested; I'll get experts and
pay them expert's salaries on that, but every salesman isn't going
to be paid like an expert.'
It is, of course, precisely with such 'presentations' that adver-
tising crosses the personal arts of salesmanship. But advertising
of every sort is also an adjunct of the salesman, which at times
threatens to displace many of his skills. Selling becomes a per-
vasive process, of which the personal salesman, crucial though
he may be, is only one link.
If selling is broken down into its component steps, it becomes
clear that the first three— contacting, arousing interest, creating
preference— are now done by advertising. Two final steps are
left to the salesman: making the specific proposal, and closing
the order. The better the first three jobs are done by the absentee
salesman, the more the salesman can concentrate on the two
pay-off jobs. But as the presentation and the visual aids move in
they displace the personal flair of the salesman even in the pay-
off jobs. Moreover, the salesman himself becomes an object of
standardization in the way he is selected and trained, so that his
personal development as a salesman becomes subject to cen-
tralized control.
Selling was once an aspect of the artisan's or farmer's role;
the sale was an integral but not very important aspect of the
whole craft or job. With specialization some men began to do
nothing but sell, although they were still related by ownership
to the commodities they handled. They judged the market and
higgled over the price, selling or not selling as they themselves
decided.
As the organization of the market becomes tighter, the sales-
man loses autonomy. He sells the goods of others, and has noth-
ing to do with the pricing. He is alienated from price fixing and
product selection. Finally, the last autonomous feature of selling,
the art of persuasion and the sales personality involved, becomes
expropriated from the individual salesman. Such has been the
general tendency and drift, in the store as well as on the road.
182 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
6. The Personality Market
In the world of the small entrepreneur, men sold goods to one
another; in the new society of employees, they first of all sell
their services. The employer of manual services buys the workers'
labor, energy, and skill; the employer of many white-collar serv-
ices, especially salesmanship, also buys the employees' social per-
sonalities. Working for wages with another's industrial property
involves a sacrifice of time, power, and energy to the employer;
workipg as a salaried employee often involves in addition the
sacrifice of one's self to a multitude of 'consumers' or clients or
managers. The relevance of personality traits to the often monot-
onous tasks at hand is a major source of 'occupational disability,'
and requires that in any theory of 'increasing misery' attention
be paid to the psychological aspects of white-collar work.
In a society of employees, dominated by the marketing men-
tality, it is inevitable that a personalit>' market should arise.
For in the great shift from manual skills to the art of 'handling,'
selling, and servicing people, personal or even intimate traits of
the employee are drawn into the sphere of exchange and become
of commercial relevance, become commodities in the labor mar-
ket. Whenever there is a transfer of control over one individual's
personal traits to another for a price, a sale of those traits which
affect one's impressions upon others, a personality market arises.
The shift from skills with things to skills with persons; from
small, informal, to large, organized firms; and from the intimate
local markets to the large anonymous market of the metropolitan
area— these have had profound psychological results in the white-
collar ranks.
One knows the salesclerk not as a person but as a commercial
mask, a stereotyped greeting and appreciation for patronage;
one need not be kind to the modern laundryman, one need only
pay him; he, in turn, needs only to be cheerful and efficient.
Kindness and friendliness become aspects of personalized service
or of public relations of big firms, rationalized to further the sale
of something. With anonymous insincerity the Successful Person
thus makes an instrument of his own appearance and personality.
THE GREAT SALESROOM 183
There are three conditions for a stabiHzed personaHty market:
First, an employee must be part of a bureaucratic enterprise,
selected, trained, and supervised by a higher authority. Second,
from within this bureaucracy, his regular business must be to
contact the public so as to present the firm's good name before
all comers. Third, a large portion of this public must be anony-
mous, a mass of urban strangers.
The expansion of distribution, the declining proportion of
small independent merchants, and the rise of anonymous urban
markets mean that more and more people are in this position.
Salespeople in large stores are of course under rules and regula-
tions that stereotype their relations with the customer. The sales-
person can only display pre-priced goods and persuade the ac-
ceptance of them. In this task she uses her 'personality.' She must
remember that she 'represents' the 'management'; and loyalty to
that anonymous organization requires that she be friendly, help-
ful, tactful, and courteous at all times. One of the floorwalker's
tasks is to keep the clerks friendly, and most large stores employ
'personnel shoppers' who check up and make reports on clerks'
'personality.'
Many salesgirls are quite aware of the difference between
what they really think of the customer and how they must act
toward her. The smile behind the counter is a commercialized
lure. Neglect of personal appearance on the part of the em-
ployee is a form of carelessness on the part of the business man-
agement. 'Self-control' pays off. 'Sincerity' is detrimental to one's
job, until the rules of salesmanship and business become a 'genu-
ine' aspect of oneself. Tact is a series of little lies about one's
feelings, until one is emptied of such feelings. 'Dignity' may be
used only to make a customer feel that she shouldn't ask the
price too soon or fail to buy the wares. Dixon Wector, who
writes that 'It has justly been remarked that the filling station
attendant has done more to raise the standard of courtesy en
masse in the United States than all the manuals of etiquette,'
does not see that this is an impersonal ceremonial, having little
to do psychologically with old-fashioned 'feeling for another.'
In the formulas of 'personnel experts,' men and women are to
be shaped into the 'well-rounded, acceptable, effective personal-
ity.' Just like small proprietors, the model sales employees com-
184 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
pete with one another in terms of services and 'personaUty';
but unlike proprietors, they cannot higgle over prices, which
are fixed, or 'judge the market' and accordingly buy wisely. Ex-
perts judge the market and speciaHsts buy the commodities. The
salesgirl cannot form her character by promotional calculations
and self-management, like the classic heroes of liberalism or the
new entrepreneurs. The one area of her occupational life in which
she might be 'free to act,' the area of her own personality, must
now also be managed, must become the alert yet obsequious in-
strument by which goods are distributed.
In the normal course of her work, because her personality be-
comes the instrument of an ahen purpose, the salesgirl becomes
self-alienated. In one large department store, a planted observer
said of one girl: 'I have been watching her for three days now.
She wears a fixed smile on her made-up face, and it never varies,
no matter to whom she speaks. I never heard her laugh spon-
taneously or naturally. Either she is frowning or her face is
devoid of any expression. When a customer approaches, she im-
mediately assumes her hard, forced smile. It amazes me because,
although I know that the smiles of most salesgirls are unreal,
I've never seen such calculation given to the timing of a smile.
I myself tried to copy such an expression, but I am unable to
keep such a smile on my face if it is not sincerely and genuinely
motivated.'
The personality market is subject to the laws of supply and
demand: when a 'seller's market' exists and labor is hard to buy,
the well-earned aggressions of the salespeople come out and
jeopardize the good will of the buying public. When there is a
'buyer's market' and jobs are hard to get, the salespeople must
again practice politeness. Thus, as in an older epoch of capital-
ism, the laws of supply and demand continue to regulate the
intimate life-fate of the individual and the kind of personality
he may develop and display.
Near the top of the personality markets are the new entre-
preneurs and the bureaucratic fixers; at the bottom are the people
in the selling ranks. Both the new entrepreneurs and the sales
personalities serve the bureaucracies, and each, in his own way,
practices the creative art of selling himself. In a restricted market
THE GREAT SALESROOM 185
economy, salesmanship is truly praised as a creative act, but, as
more alert chieftains have long been aware, it is entirely too
serious a matter to be trusted to mere creativity. The real oppor-
tunities for rationalization and expropriation are in the field of
the human personality. The fate of competition and the character
it will assume depend upon the success or failure of the adven-
tures of monopolists in this field.
Mass production standardizes the merchandise to be sold;
mass distribution standardizes the prices at which it is to be sold.
But the consumers are not yet altogether standardized. There
must be a link between mass production and individual con-
sumption. It is this link that the salesman tries to connect. On
the one hand, his selling techniques are mapped out for him,
but on the other, he must sell to individuals. Since the consumer
is usually a stranger, the salesman must be a quick 'character
analyst.' And he is instructed in human types and how to ap-
proach each: If a man is phlegmatic, handle him with delibera-
tion; if sensitive, handle him with directness; if opinionated,
with deference; if open-minded, with frankness; if cautious,
handle him with proof. But there are some traits common to
all mankind, and hence certain general methods of handling any
type: 'we refer now to a certain spirit of fraternity, courtesy, and
altruism.'
The area left open for the salesman's own creativity, his own
personality, is now the area into which the sales executives and
psychologists have begun to move. This personal equation is
stressed by them, but as it is stressed it is rationalized into the
high-powered sales-personality itself: 'The time has come,' it was
written in the middle 'twenties, 'when the salesman himself must
be more eflBciently developed.' Men must be developed who have
the positive mental attitude. Their thoughts must 'explode into
action.' 'The mind of the quitter always has a negative taint.'
The high-powered sales-personality is a man 'who sees himself
doing it' 'Never harbor a thought unless you wish to generate
motor impulses toward carrying it out. . . No one can prevent
such thoughts from arising in the mind. They spring up auto-
matically. But we need not entertain them. . . Reject them abso-
lutely. . .' 'It means simply a quiet, persistent choice to think
affirmatively and act accordingly. . . Fritz Kreisler practices six
186 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
hours each day to maintain his technique upon the violin. Is it
not worth while for the salesman to practice every day upon that
most marvelous instrument, the mind, in order that he may
achieve success?' The high-powered personality gets that way
by fixing healthy positive ideas in his consciousness and then
manipulating himself so that they sink into his subconscious
mind: '. . . when one is alone amid quiet and restful surround-
ings . . . preferably just before going to sleep . . . the doorway
. . . into the subconscious seems to be more nearly ajar than at
any other time. If at that time one will repeat over and over
again an affirmation of health, vigor, vital energy, and success,
the idea will eventually obtain lodgement in the subconscious
mind. . .'
Employers again and again demand the selection of men with
personality. A survey of employment offices made by a university
indicated that 'the college graduate with a good personality . . .
will have the best chance of being hired by business. . . More-
over, personality will be more important than high grades for all
positions except those in technical and scientific fields.' The
traits considered most important in the personnel literature are:
'ability to get along with people and to work co-operatively with
them, ability to meet and talk to people easily, and attractiveness
in appearance.'
In the literature of vocational guidance, personality often actu-
ally replaces skill as a requirement: a personable appearance is
emphasized as being more important in success and advancement
than experience or skill or intelligence. 'In hiring girls to sell
neckwear, personal appearance is considered to outweigh pre-
vious experience.' 'Personality pays dividends that neither hard
work nor sheer intelligence alone can earn for the average man.'
In a recent study of graduates of Purdue University, 'better in-
telligence paid only $150.00 a year bonuses, while personality
paid more than six times that much in return for the same period
and with the same men.'
The business with a personality market becomes a training
place for people with more effective personalities. Hundreds of
white-collar people in the Schenley Distillers Corporation, for
example, took a personality course in order to learn 'greater
friendliness . . . and warmer courtesy . . . and genuine interest
THE GREAT SALESROOM 187
in helping the caller at the reception desk.' As demand increases,
public schools add courses that attempt to meet the business
demand 'for workers with a pleasant manner.' Since business
leaders hold that 'a far greater percentage of personnel lose their
jobs because of personality difficulties than because of ineffi-
ciency,' the course features 'training in attitudes of courtesy,
thoughtfulness and friendliness; skills of voice control . . .' et
cetera. In Milwaukee, a 'Charm School' was recently set up for
city employees to teach them in eight one-hour classes 'the art
of pleasant, courteous, prompt and efficient service.' Every 'step
in every public contact' is gone into and the employees are taught
how to greet and listen to people.
Elaborate institutional sets-ups thus rationally attempt to pre-
pare people for the personality market and sustain them in their
attempt to compete on it successfully. And from the areas of
salesmanship proper, the requirements of the personality market
have diflFused as a style of life. What began as the public and
commercial relations of business have become deeply personal:
there is a public-relations aspect to private relations of all sorts,
including even relations with oneself. The new ways are diffused
by charm and success schools and by best-seller literature. The
sales personality, built and maintained for operation on the per-
sonality market, has become a dominating type, a pervasive
model for imitation for masses of people, in and out of selling.
The literature of self-improvement has generalized the traits and
tactics of salesmanship for the population at large. In this litera-
ture all men can be leaders. The poor and the unsuccessful simply
do not exist, except by an untoward act of their own will.
'A new aristocracy is springing up in the world today, an aris-
tocracy of personal charm,' each of whose members treats every-
one else as his superior, while repeating to himself that he is the
biggest and most important man in the world. It is a magnetic
society where every man is not only his own executive but
secretly, everyone else's too.*
The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom
of the great salesroom, underlies the all-pervasive distrust and
• These statements are based on a thematic examination of seven or
eight inspirational books, including Dale Carnegie's classic, How to
Win Friends and Influence People.
188 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
self-alienation so characteristic of metropolitan people. Without
common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one
man to another in transient contact has been made subtle in a
dozen ways and made to bite deeper into all areas of life and
relations. People are required by the salesman ethic and conven-
tion to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them.
In the course of time, and as this ethic spreads, it is got on to.
Still, it is conformed to as part of one's job and one's style of life,
but now with a winking eye, for one knows that manipulation
is inherent in every human contact. Men are estranged from
one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the
other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument
of himself, and is estranged from It also.
9
The Enormous File
As skyscrapers replace rows of small shops, so oflBces replace
free markets. Each oflBce within the skyscraper is a segment of
the enormous file, a part of the symbol factory that produces the
billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily
shape. From the executive's suite to the factory yard, the paper
webwork is spun; a thousand rules you never made and don't
know about are applied to you by a thousand people you have
not met and never will. The office is the Unseen Hand become
visible as a row of clerks and a set of IBM equipment, a pool of
dictaphone transcribers, and sixty receptionists confronting the
elevators, one above the other, on each floor.
The office is also a place of work. In the morning irregular
rows of people enter the skyscraper monument to the office cul-
ture. During the day they do their little part of the business sys-
tem, the government system, the war-system, the money-system,
co-ordinating the machinery, commanding each other, persuad-
ing the people of other worlds, recording the activities that make
up the nation's day of work. They transmit the printed culture
to the next day's generation. And at night, after the people leave
the skyscrapers, the streets are empty and inert, and the hand is
unseen again.
The ofiBce may be only a bundle of papers in a satchel in the
back of somebody's car; or it may be a block square, each floor a
set of glass rabbit warrens, the whole a headquarters for a nation-
wide organization of other offices, as well as plants and mines
189
190 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
and even farms. It may be attached to one department, division,
or unit, tying it to another oflRce which acts as the command post
for all the oflBces in the enterprise as a whole. And some enter-
prises, near the administrative centers of the economic file, are
nothing more than offices.
But, however big or little and whatever the shape, the mini-
mum function of an office is to direct and co-ordinate the activi-
ties of an enterprise. For every business enterprise, every factory,
is tied to some office and, by virtue of what happens there, is
linked to other businesses and to the rest of the people. Scat-
tered throughout the political economy, each office is the peak
of a pyramid of work and money and decision.
'When we picture in our minds,' says an earnest assistant gen-
eral manager, 'the possibility for absolute control over the multi-
tude of individual clerical operations through a control of forms
. . . the most important items . . . arteries through which the
life blood flows. . . Every function of every man or woman in
every department takes place by means of, or is ultimately re-
corded on, an office or plant form.'
1. The Old Office
Just the other day the first typist in the city of Philadelphia,
who had served one firm 60 years, died at the age of 80. During
her last days she recalled how it was in the earlier days. She
had come into the office from her employer's Sunday school class
in 1882. She remembered when the office was one rather dark
room, the windows always streaked with dust from the outside,
and often fogged with smoke from the potbellied stove in the
middle of the room. She remembered the green eyeshade and
the cash book, the leather-bound ledger and the iron spike on
the desk top, the day book and the quill pen, the letter press
and the box file.
At first there were only three in the office: at the high roll-top
desk, dominating the room, sat the owner; on a stool before a
high desk with a slanted top and thin legs hunched the book-
keeper; and near the door, before a table that held the new
machine, sat the white-collar girl.
THE ENORMOUS FILE 191
The bookkeeper, A. B. Nordin, Jr. recently told the National
Association ot Office Managers, was an 'old-young man, slightly
stoop-shouldered, with a sallow complexion, usually dyspeptic-
looking, with black sleeves and a green eyeshade. . . Regard-
less of the kind of business, regardless of their ages, they all
looked alike. , .' He seemed tired, and 'he was never quite happy,
because . . . his face betrayed the strain of working toward
that climax of his month's labors. He was usually a neat pen-
man, but his real pride was in his ability to add a column of
figures rapidly and accurately. In spite of this accomplishment,
however, he seldom, if ever, left his ledger for a more promising
position. His mind was atrophied by that destroying, hopeless
influence of drudgery and routine work. He was little more than
a figuring machine with an endless number of figure combina-
tions learned by heart. His feat was a feat of memory.'
Of course there had been bookkeepers long before the 'eighties;
Dickens wrote about just such men; and, as Thomas Cochran
and William Miller have observed, as early as the 1820's fear
was expressed in New York State that this new alpaca-clad man
would join with factory owners and even factory workers to rout
the landed aristocracy.
But the office girl in the 'eighties and 'nineties saw the book-
keeper at the very center of the office world. He recorded all
transactions in the day book, the journal, the cash book, or the
ledger; all the current orders and memoranda were speared on
his iron spike; on his desk and in the squat iron safe or inside
two open shelves or drawers with box files were all the papers
which the office and its staff served.
The girl in the office struggling with the early typewriters spent
at least 15 minutes every morning cleaning and oiling her mas-
sive but awkwardly delicate machine. At first typing was tedious
because she could not see what she was typing on the double-
keyboard machine without moving it up three spaces, but after a
while she seldom had to see. She also whittled pencils, and
worked the letter press, a curious device at which people had
gazed during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which made a dim
copy from the ink of the original letter.
The man at the big roll-top desk was often absent during the
day, although his cigar smoke hung in the air. Later there was
192 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
an office boy who went on many errands, but in the pre-telephone
office, the owner had often to make personal calls to transact
business. This personal contact with the outside world was paral-
leled by relations inside the office; the center was in personal
contact with the circumference and received 'its impetus there-
from.' As Balzac wrote of early offices, 'there was devotion on
one side and trust on the other.' As those on the circumference
were being trained, some could look to gaining a rounded view
of the business and in due course to moving to more responsible
positions.
2. Forces and Developments
The era of this old office was a long one; in the United States
it did not really begin to change shape until the 'nineties. Since
then, lYiany and drastic changes have occurred, but unevenly:
offices still exist that are basically not different from the old office,
but other offices seemingly have little resemblance to the nine-
teenth-century structure. The unevenness is due to the fact that
offices are attached to all forms of enterprise, many of which are
small, many big. It is especially in the big offices of the 'office
industries' that the new type has emerged— the insurance, bank-
ing, and financial lines, for example. The later history of the
office, as adapted from W. H. Leffingwell, may be described in
terms of the following developments:
I. Under the impetus of concentrated enterprise and finance,
when the office was enlarged during the first decade of the twen-
tieth century, a need was felt for a systematic arrangement of
business facts. The numerical file, with an alphabetical index,
was devised and came into broad use. Alongside the bookkeeper
and the stenographer, the clerk came to man often complicated
'systems.' As the army of clerks grew, they were divided into de-
partments, specialized in function, and thus, before machines
were introduced on any scale, socially rationalized. The work was
reorganized in a systematic and divided manner.
n. It was this social reorganization, under the impetus of work
load, higher cost, and the need for files and figures, that made
THE ENORMOUS FILE 193
possible wide application of ofBce machines. Machines did not
begin to be used widely until the second decade of the century.
A practical typewriter existed in 1874 but it was 1900 before any
considerable use of it was made; a non-listing adding machine
was invented in the late 'eighties, but only in the early twentieth
century was it used widely. Thus, machines did not impel the
development, but rather the development demanded machines,
many of which were actually developed especially for tasks al-
ready socially created.
Office machines became important during the World War I
era. Already convinced of the need for a systematic approach,
and pressed by the need for more and more statistics, managers
began to use the machine more and more to handle the existing
systems. In 1919, the National Association of Office Managers
was formed under the aegis of Frederick Taylor's ideas of sci-
entffic management. In the six or seven years before 1921, at least
a hundred new office machines a year were put on the market.
By the latter half of the 'twenties, most offices of any size were
equipped with many types; by 1930, according to one govern-
ment survey, some 30 per cent of the women in offices were,
in the course of at least part of their work, using machines other
than typewriters. Eight years later, well over a million office
workers were. Today it is repeatedly asserted that at least 80
per cent of office jobs can be mechanized.
Yet, it has to be recognized that in the twenty years before
World War II, there was a lag in the office's industrial revolu-
tion: office employment rose faster than office machines were
introduced. The number of office people rose steadily since
1900, but office-machine sales remained at relatively low levels.
World War II gave the real impetus to office technology: the
prewar rate of office-machine sales was about 270 million dollars;
by 1948 it was grossing one billion. Before the war there was
serious talk of office decentralization in order to lower office
costs; now new office machines, as one business journal puts it,
make bigness workable.
In the later 'forties there were 3000 machines on display each
year at business shows. There is a mechanical collator whose
metal fingers snatch sheets of paper from five piles in proper
sequence, and staple them for distribution. There are ticket and
194 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
money counters, mechanical erasers and automatic signature
machines, which promise to increase oflBce production from 25
to 300 per cent. Gadgets can add, subtract, multiply, divide and
duplicate— all at once; can type in 51 languages, open and seal
envelopes, stamp and address them. There is a billing machine
that takes raw paper in at one end, cuts it to size, perforates it,
prints two-color forms on it, prints the amounts of the bills,
addresses them, and neatly piles them up for the postman. There
is a television set-up through which a man can flick a switch and
observe a worker in any part of his office or plant. There is an
incredibly dextrous machine into which cards are slipped, which
sends out tailor-made replies to every imaginable complaint and
inquiry.
Most startling perhaps are the new electronic calculators,
which store up one thousand units of information on a quarter
of an inch of magnetic tape. In one insurance company, such
machines 'take in the data in regard to a policy being surren-
dered, look up the cash value, interpolate for the premium paid
to date, multiply by the amount of insurance, total any loans,
compute the interest on each loan and total that, credit the value
of any dividend accumulations and any premiums paid in ad-
vance, and type out the check in payment of the net value of the
policy.'
Of course, such machines are practical only in big offices. But
there are incredible savings in time and cost and accuracy from
even simple, inexpensive gadgets: for example, a speed-feed for
a single typewriter which inserts and removes carbons automati-
cally—by hand, 25 bills an hour; by speed-feed, 75 an hour. A
table especially constructed for opening letters increases output
some 30 per cent. With a standard typewriter one girl can turn
out 600 premium-due notices a day; with electric typewriters
and continuous forms, the same girl can do 700. Dictating ma-
chines can cut a secretary's letter time in half. The small busi-
nessman can also draw upon one of the 80 IBM service stations
throughout the nation, which will handle his whole payroll by
machine on punch cards.
The industrial revolution now comes to the office much faster
than it did to the factory, for it has been able to draw upon the
factory as a model. The very size of U.S. industry has brought
THE ENORMOUS FILE 195
an incredible increase in paper work, and the enlargement and
complication of the U.S. office. Machines in the office were
needed to keep up with the effects and management of machines
in the plant. The sweep of increased corporation mergers, espe-
cially in the 'twenties, further enlarged the unit of the business
structure and entailed more extensive co-ordination. Then the
government demanded more business records: in the First World
War, national income taxes were instituted; the New Deal
brought the volume of paper work to new heights by social secu-
rity, wage-hour laws, deductions of taxes, et cetera, from pay-
rolls; the Second World War not only added to the paper burden
but, as the labor market tightened, made it more difficult to get
college-level people to do cabinet filing jobs. The income of office
workers rose also; trade unions threatened continuously, and
office productivity was considered low. The answer was clear:
machinery in the office.
Yet we are still only in the beginning of the office-machine
age. Only when the machinery and the social organization of the
office are fully integrated in terms of maximum efficiency per
dollar spent will that age be full blown. Today, the machine in-
vestment per industrial worker varies from $19,375 in the chemi-
cal industry to $2,659 in textiles; the average per office worker
is not more than $1000.
III. As machines spread, they began to prompt newer divisions
of labor to add to those they had originally merely implemented.
The new machines, especially the more complex and costly ones,
require central control of offices previously scattered throughout
the enterprise. This centralization, which prompts more new
divisions of labor, is again facilitated by each new depression,
through the urge to cut costs, and each new war, through the
increased volume of office work. The present extent of office
centralization has not been precisely measured, although the
tendency has been clear enough since the early 'twenties: by then
machines and social organizations had begun to interact, and
that is the true mark of the 'era of scientffic management in the
office.' That era is still in its late infancy, but it is clearly the
model of the future.
196 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
Neither machmes nor other factory-type techniques could be
efficiently applied until 'small groups of uncontrolled stenog-
raphers throughout the office' were brought into 'one central
stenographic section.' Detached office units, often duplicating
one another's work, must be drawn into a central office. New
work and job routines are invented in order to get maximum use
from the costly machines. Like manufacturing equipment, they
are not to remain idle if it can possibly be avoided. Therefore,
the work the machines do must be centralized into one pool.
Machines and centralization go together in company after
company: and together they increase output and lower unit costs.
They also open the way to the full range of factory organization
and techniques: work can be simplffied and specialized; work
standards for each operation can be set up and applied to indi-
vidual workers. 'We believe firmly,' says one office manager, 'in
getting a proper record of individual production in order . . .
[to] determine a definite cost unit of work. . .' By 'measuring the
work of individual employees . . . we have a firm basis on
which ... to effect economy of operation.'
Any work that is measurable can be standardized, and often
broken down into simple operations. Then it can proceed at a
standard pace, which 'scientffic investigation has determined can
be performed by a first class worker in a stated time.' The very
computation of such standards prompts new splitting of more
complex tasks and increased specialization. For specialization
and control from the top, along with standards, interact. When
a gauge can be provided for the abilities of each person, the
establishment of standards gives the office a new, more even
tempo.
Time and motion studies are, of course, well known in many
insurance companies and banks. In the 'twenties, some 16 per
cent of one group of companies, and in 1942, some 28 per cent,
were making time and motion measurements. One company, for
example, which sets its standards this way, decreased its person-
nel by one-third; another decreased its personnel 39 per cent,
while increasing its volume of work 40 per cent.
Cost reduction proceeds by eliminating some work and sim-
plifying the rest. To do this, a functional breakdown of job opera-
tions is made, and a functional breakdown of human abilities;
THE ENORMOUS FILE 197
then the two breakdowns are mated in a new, simplified set of
routinized tasks. Along with this, machines are introduced for
all possible features of the work process that cost factors allow.
Then the effects of these factory-like procedures upon the office
workers are rationalized and compulsory rest periods set up
to relieve fatigue.
The process is extended even to the worker's life before he
enters the office. Crack oflBce men have known for some time
that training for rationalization must start in the schools: 'The
oflBce manager should contact local schools, explain his require-
ments and solicit school aid in training students of commercial
subjects to meet office requirements. School courses can easily be
designed to qualify graduates for the work requirements in our
offices.'
Even the physical layout and appearance of the office become
more factory-like. Office architecture and layout move toward
two goals: the abolition of private offices and the arrange-
ment of a straight-line flow of work. One office moved to new
quarters where 200 former private offices were reduced to 17.
This shift provided more light and better supervision. 'People
really do keep busier when the officer in charge can look at them
occasionally.' In this same office, 'the various activities have been
placed to facilitate the flow of work. Work flows vertically from
one floor to another, as well as horizontally on the same floor.
That departments may be near each other vertically is usually
taken into consideration when planning factories; this vertical
"nearness" is not always considered in planning clerical working
quarters.' Merely re-shuffling the desk plan can effect a saving
of 15 per cent in standard hour units.
The next step is clear: a moving 'belt' replaces desks. As early
as 1929, Grace Coyle observed in one large firm: 'orders are
passed along by means of a belt and lights from a chief clerk to
a series of checkers and typists, each of whom does one opera-
tion. The girl at the head of the line interprets the order, puts
down the number and indicates the trade discount; the second
girl prices the order, takes off the discount, adds carriage
charges and totals; the third girl gives the order a number and
makes a daily record; the fourth girl puts this information on an
alphabetical index; the fifth girl time-stamps it: it next goes along
198 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
the belt to one of several typists, who makes a copy in sextuplicate
and puts on address labels; the seventh girl checks it and sends
it to the storeroom.'
Today one machine can do what this belt-line of girls did
twenty-five years ago. But even with machines— 'In any produc-
tion process the importance of good tools is no greater than the
relationship that exists between them,' Albert H. Strieker has
observed. 'Before a production line can attain maximum eflFec-
tiveness, the machines must be arranged to permit the unimpeded
flow of parts or products from one end of the line to the other.
In their proper position as the vital tools of paper- work produc-
tion, typewriters and calculating machines, tabulators and book-
keeping machines, furniture and all forms of office equipment
can be arranged and combined to create an effective office-pro-
duction line.'
These techniques and ways of reasoning have been long estab-
lished in office-management circles and are identical with the
reasoning found in factory-management circles. Their advance
in offices, however, is still uneven, being perhaps, in the first
instance, limited by the size of the office. Only about half of U.S.
clerical workers in 1930 were in offices of over 50 workers; but
offices continually become larger and, as they do, changes occur:
personal telephone calls, smoking during office hours, visits from
personal friends, and handling of personal mail are restricted,
while mechanization and social rationalization— including rest
periods, rest rooms, and hospital plans— increase.
3. The White-Collar Girl
Between the still-remaining old office and the vanguard, fully-
rationalized office, there is a widespread, intermediate type. Just
before World War I, Sinclair Lewis in The Job described such
an office, which, although caricatured, is not untypical:
At the top, the chiefs, department heads and officers of the
company, 'big, florid, shaven, large-chinned men, talking easily
. . . able in a moment's conference at lunch to "shift the policy."
. . . When they jovially entered the elevator together, some
high-strung stenographer would rush over to one of the older
women to weep and be comforted. . .'
THE ENORMOUS FILE 199
Below them there was 'the caste of bright young men who
would some day have the chance to be beatified into chiefs,' who
looked loyally to the chiefs, 'worshipped the house policy,' and
sat, 'in silk shirts and new ties, at shiny, flat-topped desks in rows'
answering the telephone 'with an air.'
Intermingled with them were the petty chiefs, the oflBce man-
agers and bookkeepers, who were 'velvety' to those above them,
but 'twangily nagging' to those under them, 'Failures themselves,
they eyed sourly the stenographers who desired two dollars more
a week, and assured them that while, personally, they would be
very glad to obtain the advance for them, it would be "unfair to
the other girls." '
Somewhat outside the main hierarchy was the small corps of
private secretaries, each the 'daily confidante to one of the gods.'
Nevertheless, these confidantes were not able 'to associate' with
the gods, or 'he friendly, in coat-room or rest-room or elevator,
with the unrecognized horde of girls who merely copied or took
the bright young men's dictation.'
These girls of the common herd were expected to call the sec-
retaries "Miss," no matter what street corner impertinences they
used to one another.' Factional rivalry split them. 'They were
expected to keep clean and be quick-moving; beyond that they
were as unimportant to the larger phases of office politics as frogs
to a summer hotel. Only the cashier's card index could remem-
ber their names.' Their several types included 'the white-haired,
fair-handed women of fifty and sixty . . . spinsters and widows,
for whom life was nothing but a desk and a job of petty pickings
—mailing circulars or assorting letters or checking up lists.' And
also, 'the girls of twenty-two getting tired, the women of twenty-
eight getting dried and stringy, the women of thirty-five in a solid
maturity of large-bosomed and widowed spinster-hood, the old
women purring and catty and tragic. . .'
It is from this kind of office, rather than the dusty, midget
office of old or the new factory-like lay-out, that the common
stereotypes of the office world and its inhabitants, particularly
the white-collar girl, are drawn. Probably the major image is
that the office is full of women. Of course, American women work
elsewhere; they have had two generations of experience in fac-
200 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
tories and in service industries. But this experience has not been
so generahzed and diflFused, except briefly during wars, as has
the experience of the white-collar girl.
It is as a secretary or clerk, a business woman or career girl,
that the white-collar girl dominates our idea of the office. She is
the office, write the editors of Fortune: 'The male is the name on
the door, the hat on the coat rack, and the smoke in the corner
room. But the male is not the office. The office is the competent
woman at the other end of his buzzer, the two young ladies
chanting his name monotonously into the mouthpieces of a kind
of gutta-percha halter, the four girls in the glass coop pecking
out his initials with pink fingernails on the keyboards of four
voluble machines, the half dozen assorted skirts whisking through
the filing cases of his correspondence, and the elegant miss in the
reception room recognizing his friends and disposing of his antip-
athies with the pleased voice and impersonal eye of a presidential
consort.'
Novels about white-collar girls, appearing mainly in the 'twen-
ties, were very popular. Kitty Foyle's time is from 1911 through
the middle 'thirties; Minnie Hutzler, another Morley character
in Human Beings, is followed from 1889 to 1929; the story of
Janey Williams of Dos Passos' USA runs from 1900 to 1920; Tark-
ington's Alice Adams and Sinclair Lewis's Una Golden lived be-
fore World War I. Ten years on either side of the First World
War— that was the time of the greatest literary interest in the
white-collar girl. The images are tied to the scenes of that period
of white-collar work, and many of the images presented are
strikingly similar.
Sinclair Lewis's Una Golden, Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams,
and Christopher Morley 's Kitty Foyle— each was thrown into
white-collar work after the death or failure of her father and in
each case the father was an old middle-class man who had not
been doing well.
The small-town Goldens were 'too respectable to permit her
to have a job, and too poor to permit her to go to college.' Her
father, 'a petty small town' lawyer, died when she was 24, and
she and her mother were left with no inheritance. They began
to enact the standard pattern of widowed mother, 'pawing at
THE ENORMOUS FILE 201
culture,' and the unemployed daughter. For such mother-daugh-
ter teams there were three small-town possibilities: 'If they were
wealthy, daughter collected rents and saw lawyers and belonged
to a club and tried to keep youthful at parties. If middle class,
daughter taught school, almost invariably. If poor, mother did
the washing and daughter collected it. So it was marked down
for Una that she would be a teacher.' But she didn't want to
teach; the only other job available was in a dry-goods store,
which would have meant loss of caste; and all the energetic
young men had gone to the big cities; so she gambled and went
with her mother to New York, where she attended a 'college of
commerce' and became an 'office woman.'
The story of Alice Adams— sociologically the most acute of
these novels— is a story of aspirations being whittled down to
white-collar size. It opens with Alice going to a party at the
home of an upper-class family; it ends with her climbing the
darkened stairway of a business college, like a girl taking the
nun's veil, after frustration in love and social aspiration. Through-
out the book, lurking in the background like a slum by a gold
coast, the 'begrimed stairway' of the business college is seen by
Alice, with 'a glance of vague misgiving,' as a road to 'hideous
obscurity.' When Alice thinks of it, she thinks of 'pretty girls turn-
ing into withered creatures as they worked at typing machines';
old maids 'taking dictation' from men with double chins, a dozen
different kinds of old maids 'taking dictation.' The office is a
production plant for old maids, a modern nunnery. The contrast
is between the business college and the glamorous stage, or the
profitable, early, lovely marriage.
Yet the business college has 'an unpleasant fascination for her,
and a mysterious reproach, which she did not seek to fathom.'
At the end, her ascent of the begrimed stairway is 'the end of
youth and the end of hope.' When she goes to the business col-
lege, she does not wear any 'color' (rouge) even though her am-
bitious mother, not knowing where she is going, tells her to get
up gay when she goes out.
Alice Adams is a novel of Alice's father's occupational fate
as well as of Alice's. The father is the head of the 'sundries de-
partment' of a wholesale drug house; he displays an intense loy-
alty to the firm and the man who owns and runs it. But the little
202 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
motor of his wife's ambition drives him to quit the salaried em-
ployee's meager dole and go on the market with a business of his
own. He fails. Both Alice and her father finally face modern
realities; at the end, the father moves from clerk to entrepreneur-
failure to 'the landlady's husband around a boarding-house';
Alice becomes the white-collar girl.
In American folklore, the white-collar girl is usually born of
small-town lower middle-class parents. High school plays an
important part in the creation of her rather tense personality.
She may take a commercial coirrse in high school, and possibly
a year or two of business college. Upon graduation, being smart
and pretty, she gets a job in her own town. But she yearns for
independence from family and other local ties; she wants to go
to the big city, most of all. New York. She leaves home, and the
family becomes of secondary importance, for it represents a
status restriction on independence. Going home to see the folks
is a reluctantly done chore, and she can't wait to get back to
the big city. To get started in New York she may even borrow
money from a bank, rather than ask her parents for it.
The white-collar girl in the big city often looks back on her
high-school period in the small town as the dress rehearsal for
something that never came off. The personal clique of the high
school is not replaced by the impersonal unity of the office; the
adolescent status equality is not replaced by the hierarchy of the
city; the close-up thrill of the high-school date is not replaced
by the vicarious distances of the darkened movie; the high-
school camaraderie of anticipations is not fulfilled by the realiza-
tion of life-fate in the white-collar world.
The white-collar girl has a close friend, sometimes from the
same home town, and usually a girl more experienced in the big
city. They commonly share an apartment, a wardrobe and a
budget, their dates and their troubles. The close friend is an
essential psychological need in the big city, and the white-collar
girl's only salvation from loneliness and boredom.
The first job is a continuation of her education as a stenog-
rapher or typist. Her pay check is small, but she does learn
oflBce routine with its clean, brisk, new, eflBcient bustle. She also
learns how to handle the male element in the office, begins to
THE ENORMOUS FILE 203
believe that all men are after only one thing. She laughs about
small, funny incidents with the other girls, especially last night's
date and tonight's. She is given her first cocktail by a salesman
who is an expert on the psychology of girl stenographers.
The first job is usually the toughest, and she goes through sev-
eral jobs before she gets the one she settles down in, if she can
be said to settle down. In between jobs, of course, she has the
most difficult time. The office is at first not a pleasant place, but
she gets to know it and can soon classify all its people. There is
the boss in the front, whose private secretary she hopes some
day to become. There are minor executives and salesmen, who
are eligible for marriage or dates or at least good for dinners.
'When you're working on $18-a-week like those kids you don't
go out evenings unless someone takes you. You sit home with
a lemon coke and wash stockings and iron a slip and buy the
evening papers in turns and set the alarm clock so there'll be
time to walk to work in the morning.' Finally there is the old man
who is either a clerk or an accountant, and there are the 'fresh'
office boys.
The love story of the white-collar girl often involves frustrat-
ing experiences with some boy-friend. For Kitty Foyle, there
was Wyn; for Minnie, there was Richard Roe; for Janey, there
was Jerry. When the white-collar girl does not get her man, the
experience hardens her, turns her from the simple, small-town
girl to the cool, polished, and urbane career woman or bachelor
girl. She has no objection to love affairs 'if she cares enough'
about the fellow, but she cannot get over her interest in marriage.
After her first frustrating experience, however, love becomes
secondary to her career. For she has begun to enjoy her position
and is promoted; after the first level stretch she is always on the
slight upgrade. As she becomes a successful career woman, her
idea of getting an upper-class man increases, and she is 'too
mature to interest the average male of her acquaintance.' Usually
she prefers men who are older than she. After 30, she looks back,
somewhat maternally, upon the casual \ovb life of the happy-go-
lucky younger girls. Now she is the mature woman, efficient in
her job, suppressing her love for her married boss, to whom she
makes herself indispensable, doing the housework of his busi-
ness. This relieves the impersonal business atmosphere and the
204 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
tension between superior and employee, but it is also complicated
by the tact that she may feel threatened by the eroticism of
younger women.
Between the first two wars she talks like this: 'Molly and me
had a talk one time about the white-collar woman— there's mil-
lions of them, getting maybe 15 to 30 a week— they've got to
dress themselves right up to the hilt, naturally they have a yen
for social pleasure, need to be a complete woman with all
woman's satisfaction and they need a chance to be creating and
doing. And the men their own age can't do much for them, also
the girls grow up too damn fast because they absorb the point
of view of older people they work for. Their own private life gets
to be a rat-race. Jesusgod, I read about the guts of the pioneer
woman and the woman of the dust bowl and the gingham god-
dess of the covered wagon. What about the woman of the cov-
ered typewriter! What has she got, poor kid, when she leaves the
office. . . Do you know what we are? We're sharecroppers. We
work like nigger hands in a cotton field and give Palmer's more
brainwork than they know what to do with, what do we get for
it? Eight hours' sleep, I guess, because that's about all we're
fit for. . . I guess nobody minds so much being a sharecropper
if he's damn sure that the crop's worth raising. But it must be nice
to feel some of that ground you sweat belongs to yourself.'
In time she yearns for a family future, but settles down for
longer stretches into the loveless routine of the office. Somehow
it sustains her. Minnie, in fact, is against the institution of mar-
riage; Kitty has an abortion in order that a child will not inter-
fere with her position. Career has been substituted for marriage;
the conflict of the white-collar girl is resolved; she has climbed
the stairway; she is in the nunnery.
4. The New Office
The modern office with its tens of thousands of square feet and
its factory-like flow of work is not an informal, friendly place.
The drag and beat of work, the 'production unit' tempo, require
that time consumed by anything but business at hand be ex-
plained and apologized for. Dictation was once a private meet-
ing of executive and secretary. Now the executive phones a pool
THE ENORMOUS FILE 205
of dictaphone transcribers whom he never sees and who know
him merely as a voice. Many old types of personnel have become
machine operators, many new types began as machine operators.
I. The rise of the office manager, from a 'chief clerk' to a re-
sponsible executive reporting directly to the company treasurer
or vice president, is an obvious index to the enlargement of
offices and to the rise of the office as a centralized service divi-
sion of the entire enterprise. It is under him that the factory-like
office has been developing. Specializing as he does in the rational
and efficient design and service of office functions, the office
manager can obviously do a better job than a detached minor
supervisor.
The office manager had begun to appear in the larger com-
panies by the late 'twenties. Many early office managers were
'detail men' holding other positions, perhaps in the accounting
department, but at the same time Tiandling' the office force. But
as the office increased in importance and in costs, it grew into an
autonomous unit and the office manager grew with it. He had to
know the clerical work and the routing of all departments; he
had to be able to design and to adapt to new administrative
schemes and set-ups; he had to train new employees and re-train
old ones. The all-company scope of his domain gave room for
his knowledge and prestige to increase, or at least his claims for
prestige vis a vis 'other department heads.' By 1929, about one-
third of one large group of office managers came from non-
office executive positions, whereas half worked up through the
office, and some 17 per cent came up through other offices, so
that one may assume the position already had a recognized status,
II. As office machinery is introduced, the number of routine
jobs is increased, and consequently the proportion of 'positions
requiring initiative' is decreased. 'Mechanization is resulting in
a much clearer distinction between the managing staflF and the
operating staff,' observed the War Manpower Commission. 'Fin-
ger dexterity is often more important than creative thinking. Pro-
motions consequently become relatively rare. . . Some large
office managers actually prefer to hire girls who are content to
206 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
remain simply clerks, who will attempt to rise no higher than
their initial level.'
As we compare the personnel of the new office with that of
the old, it is the mass of clerical machine-operatives that immedi-
ately strikes us. They are the most factory-like operatives in the
white-collar worlds. The period of time required to learn their
skills seems steadily to decline; it must, in fact, if the expense
of introducing machines and new standardized specializations
is to be justified. For the key advantages of most mechanical and
centralizing office devices are that, while they permit greater
speed and accuracy, they also require cheaper labor per unit,
less training, simpler specialization, and thus replaceable em-
ployees.
These interchangeable clerks often punch a time clock, are not
allowed to talk during working hours, and have no tenure of
employment beyond a week or sometimes a month. They typi-
cally have no contact with supervisors except in the course of
being supervised. In large ofiices these people are the major
links in the system, but in their minds and in those of their man-
agers, there is rarely any serious thought of learning the whole
system and rising within it. Even in the middle 'twenties 88 per
cent of the office managers questioned in one survey indicated
that they definitely needed people 'who give little promise of
rising to an executive status,' and 60 per cent stated that there
was Very little opportunity' in their offices to learn, and hence
rise, by apprenticeship.
The rationalization of the office, on the one hand, attracts and
creates a new mass of clerks and machine operators, and their
work increasingly approximates the factory operative in light
manufacturing. On the other hand, this new office requires the
office manager, a specialized manager who operates the human
machinery.
III. The bookkeeper has been grievously affected by the last
half century of office change: his old central position is usurped
by the office manager, and even the most experienced bookkeeper
with pen and ink cannot compete with a high-school girl trained
in three or four months to use a machine. It is like a pick and
shovel against a power scoop.
THE ENORMOUS FILE 207
The bookkeeping or billing machine posts^ enters, totals, and
balances; from the accumulated postings control accounts are
made up. And such a machine is a simple sort of apparatus,
although it is still second only to the typewriter in oflBces today.
Other new machines displace ten of the old, and their operatives,
at one stroke. Just as the high-school girl with her machine has
displaced the pen-and-ink bookkeeper, so the big new machines
promise, in due course, to displace the high-school girl. At the
top of the new 'bookkeeping' world are the professional account-
ants and electronic technicians. But their predominance on any
practical scale is still largely to come. In the meantime, the
stratum of older bookkeepers is demoted to the level of the
clerical mass.
'When recruiting new employees for this operation,' says the
manager of a bookkeeping operation in a large company, 'we
seek girls about seventeen years minimum age, at least two
years' high school or its equivalent, with no previous business
experience and good personal qualifications. We prefer inexperi-
enced girls and those who have some economic incentive to work
as we have found they make the steadiest workers; so we select
from our recruits what we classify as the semi-dependent or
wholly dependent applicant. . .'
IV. The secretary has been the model of aspiration for most
oflBce girls. The typewriter has, of course, been the woman's
machine, and in itself it has not led to factory-like efi^ects. In
and out of the oflBce world, it has been a highly respectable ma-
chine. Its operator, equipped with stenographer's pad, has man-
aged to borrow prestige from her close and private contact with
the executive.
The standard girl-hierarchy in ofiBces has been formed around
the typewriter in the following way: (1) The private secretary,
as someone's confidential assistant, in many cases can actually
act for him on many not always routine matters. She takes care
of his appointments, his daily schedule, his check book— is, in
short, justifiably called his office wife. If her boss's office warrants
it, she may even have stenographers and typists working for her.
(2) The stenographer is a typist who also takes dictation. (3)
The typist works only with the machine; because her work is a
208 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
straight copying matter, her most important traits are speed and
accuracy at the keyboard. Unlike the secretary, and to a lesser
extent the stenographer, she is usually closely supervised.
In the new, rationalized office, this hierarchy— graded in in-
come, skill, degree of supervision, and access to important per-
sons—has begun to break down. There is now a strong tendency
to limit the number of secretaries; many $15,000-a-year execu-
tives do not have private secretaries and never see a shorthand
stenographer. Instead they dictate to a machine, whose cylinders
go to a pool of typists. Although this pooling of stenographic
services took place in many big offices before dictaphone equip-
ment was installed, usually the two went together. Systematic
studies clearly revealed the wastefulness of individually assigned
stenographers, the alternate periods of slack and of frenzy rather
than a smooth and efficient flow.
Since its beginnings in the 'twenties, the centralization of the
stenographic operation has spread continuously, being limited
only by size of office and inertia. The trend is for only the senior
executives to have private secretaries and for both stenographers
and typists to become pooled as transcribing typists. In one large
insurance company's home office less than 2 per cent of the em-
ployees are assigned as secretaries to persons above the rank
of Division Manager. The junior executive has his stenographer
on his desk in a metal box, or may even dictate directly to the
transcribing pool via inter-office telephone.
The centralized transcribing pool has further advantages: for
the 'poor dictator,' the machines allow adjustments in audibility;
they eliminate over-time imposed by late afternoon dictation,
and also the strain of reading hurriedly written notes. 'They hear
it automatically and have only to punch the keys to get the re-
sults,' the managerial literature states. 'Girls with speed and
accuracy' are what are wanted in the new office.
The skill of shorthand becomes obsolete; the white-collar girl
becomes almost immediately replaceable; work in offices be-
comes increasingly a blind-alley. The new white-collar girl cannot
know intimately some segment of the office or business, and has
lost the private contact that gave status to the secretary and even
the stenographer. The work is regulated so that it can be speeded
up and effectively supervised by non-executive personnel. In
THE ENORMOUS FILE 209
short, the prized white-collar spot for women is becoming more
and more the job of a factory-like operative. By the early 'thir-
ties, Amy Hewes was observing, 'The shadowy line between
many . . . clerical tasks and unskilled factory occupations is be-
coming more and more imperceptible.'
The new oflBce is rationalized: machines are used, employees
become machine attendants; the work, as in the factory, is col-
lective, not individualized; it is standardized for interchange-
able, quickly replaceable clerks; it is specialized to the point of
automatization. The employee group is transformed into a uni-
form mass in a soundless place, and the day itself is regulated
by an impersonal time schedule. Seeing the big stretch of oflBce
space, with rows of identical desks, one is reminded of Herman
Melville's description of a nineteenth-century factory: 'At rows
of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with
blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding
blank paper.'
5. The White-Collar Hierarchy
The new oflBce at once raises a hierarchy and levels out per-
sonnel. The hierarchy is based upon the power and authority
held by the managerial cadre, rather than upon the levels of skill.
The individual employee is a unit in an administrative hierarchy
of authority and discipline, but he is also equal before it with
many other employees. Within this hierarchy and mass, he is
classified by the function he performs, but sometimes there are
also 'artificial' distinctions of status, position, and above all title.
These distinctions, to which Carl Dreyfuss has called attention,
arise on the one hand from the employee's need to personalize
a little area for himself, and on the other, they may be encour-
aged by management to improve morale and to discourage em-
ployee 'solidarity.'
In the enormous file, smaller hierarchies fit into larger ones
and are interlinked in a dozen ways. There is a formal line-up
expressed by titles, and beneath these, further gradations in
status and rank. Rank does not always correspond to skill or sal-
ary level; in general, it is expressed in the authority to give
210 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
orders. The managerial cadre, infiltrating all divisions and units,
is the backbone of the hierarchy. Where one stands depends,
first upon the extent to which one participates in the cadre's au-
thority, and second, the closeness of one's association with its
members. The private secretary of the top manager of a division
may thus be superior in rank and status to the assistant manager
of a division further down. Educational level and experience
naturally lend status, but only secondarily. It is from the mana-
gerial cadre that esteem is derived and status borrowed.
If the white-collar hierarchy were purely bureaucratic it would
be based upon sheer formal authority, as in an army; but actu-
ally, nowhere are bureaucratic principles of organization strictly
carried through. Within and between offices, there is usually a
system of cliques, which often cut across the formal line of au-
thority and work. Through them 'the man in the know' can cut
red tape, and secretaries of top men, 'administrative assistants'
as they are called in Washington, can call other secretaries to
expedite matters that would take much longer through the regu-
lar channels.
Status inside the hierarchy is not always in line with formal
participation in management; a fictitious closeness to authority
may bring prestige. Private secretaries, as well as other confiden-
tial assistants to managers, thus often stand out. Only in rare
cases do they actively show or have authority, but their position
requires close contact with authority and they handle and even
help to shape its secrets. By inner identification, they often have
a strong illusion of authority and, by outward manner, impress
it on others. This is by no means discouraged by the managers,
for the gap between the confidential employee and 'the girls' is
a guarantee of loyalty, and moreover a reciprocal influence in
the increased prestige of the managers themselves. The scale of
available beauty, for instance, may influence the selection as well
as class factors— the Anglo-Saxon, upper middle-class girl having
a better chance.
Those in intimate contact with authority form a sort of screen
around the persons who carry it, insuring its privacy and hence
heightening its prestige. In a great many offices and stores today
the rank and file never see 'the higher ups,' but only their im-
mediate supervisors, who are known as 'the boss.' Grievances
THE ENORMOUS FILE 211
and resentments are aimed at 'the boss'; the 'higher-ups' come
within psychological view, if at all, only in fantasy: 'If I could
only get in contact with them, I know I'd be given my chance.'
Titles and appurtenances, which are related in intricate ways
to formal authority, are outward and crucial signs of status. To
have a telephone on one's desk, to use one lavatory or another,
to have one's name on the door or even on a placard on a desk-
all such items can and do form the content of the employee's
conscious striving and hope. A great deal has been made of such
distinctions. Carl Dreyfuss alleged that they form 'an artificial
hierarchy' which is encouraged and exploited by the employer
who does not wish solidarity. When many small gradations in
status exist, the employee can more often experience the illusion
of 'being somebody' and of ascending the scale. Often 'there are
more rank than salary gradations but even the latter exceed the
number of groupings actually required from a technical point
of view.*
But such distinctions, in so far as they are not based on work
performed, fall, in time, before the cost-reduction drives of man-
agement and the egalitarian push of trade unions, which strive
to classify jobs more systematically. According to this view, the
norm of the 'genuine' hierarchy is technical and economic, that
is, strictly bureaucratic; but actually status elements are no more
'artificial' than technical and economic ones. Differentiations do,
of course, develop on status factors alone, and they are often of
crucial, even overpowering importance in white-collar hier-
archies. But the over-all trend is against them. Even though em-
ployers may try to exploit them to discourage solidarity, once a
union tries to break the job divisions down and then to fight for
corresponding income gradations, employers are usually ready
to level out status differences in order to lower costs.
Only a sophisticated employer strongly beleaguered by at-
tempted unionization might see reasons to make conscious use of
prestige gradations. It would not, however, seem the most ra-
tional choice he might make and, in fact, the employer has been
the leader of job descriptions and personnel work that reduce
the number of complex functions and break down the work and
hence lower pay. Machines implement and prompt such strict
technical and bureaucratic gradation. And certainly, even if the
212 WHITE COLLAR WORLDS
artificial hierarchy has been used as a manner of control, ration-
alization and mechanization are now well on their way to destroy
such schemes.
Mechanized and standardized work, the decline of any chance
for the employee to see and understand the whole operation, the
loss of any chance, save for a very few, for private contact with
those in authority— these form the model of the future. At present,
status complications inside office and store are still often quite
important in the psychology of the employee; but, in the main
drift, technical and economic factors and the authoritative line-up
will gain ascendency over such status factors as now interfere
with the rationalization of the white-collar hierarchy.
THREE
Styles of Life
*My active life, if I ever had one, ended
when I was sixteen,' says Mr. BowHng
of George Orwell's Coming Up for Air.
'I got the job and ... the job got
me. . . Everything that really matters
to me had happened before that date. . .
Well, they say that happy people have
no histories, and neither do the blokes
who work in insurance offices.'
10
Work
Work may be a mere source of livelihood, or the most signifi-
cant part of one's inner life; it may be experienced as expiation,
or as exuberant expression of self; as bounden duty, or as the
development of man's universal nature. Neither love nor hatred
of work is inherent in man, or inherent in any given line of work.
For work has no intrinsic meaning.
No adequate history of the meanings of work has been written.
One can, however, trace the influences of various philosophies
of work, which have filtered down to modern workers and which
deeply modify their work as well as their leisure.
While the modern white-collar worker has no articulate philos-
ophy of work, his feelings about it and his experiences of it in-
fluence his satisfactions and frustrations, the whole tone of his
life. Whatever the effects of his work, known to him or not, they
are the net result of the work as an activity, plus the meanings
he brings to it, plus the views that others hold of it.
1. Meanings of Work
To the ancient Greeks, in whose society mechanical labor was
done by slaves, work brutalized the mind, made man unfit for
the practice of virtue.* It was a necessary material evil, which
the elite, in their search for changeless vision, should avoid. The
* In this historical sketch of philosophies of work I have drawn
upon Adriano Tilgher's Work: What It Has Meant to Men through
the Ages (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930).
215
216 STYLES OF LIFE
Hebrews also looked upon work as 'painful drudgery,' to which,
they added, man is condemned by sin. In so far as work atoned
for sin, however, it was worth while, yet Ecclesiastes, for ex-
ample, asserts that 'The labor of man does not satisfy the soul.'
Later, Rabbinism dignified work somewhat, viewing it as worthy
exercise rather than scourge of the soul, but still said that the
kingdom to come would be a kingdom of blessed idleness.
In primitive Christianity, work was seen as punishment for
sin but also as serving the ulterior ends of charity, health of body
and soul, warding ofiF the evil thoughts of idleness. But work,
being of this world, was of no worth in itself. St. Augustine,
when pressed by organizational problems of the church, carried
the issue further: for monks, work is obligatory, although it
should alternate with prayer, and should engage them only
enough to supply the real needs of the establishment. The church
fathers placed pure meditation on divine matters above even
the intellectual work of reading and copying in the monas-
tery. The heretical sects that roved around Europe from the
eleventh to the fourteenth century demanded work of man, but
again for an ulterior reason: work, being painful and humiliat-
ing, should be pursued zealously as a 'scourge for the pride of
the flesh.'
With Luther, work was first established in the modem mind
as 'the base and key to life.' While continuing to say that work
is natural to fallen man, Luther, echoing Paul, added that all
who can work should do so. Idleness is an unnatural and evil
evasion. To maintain oneself by work is a way of serving God.
With this, the great split between religious piety and worldly
activity is resolved; profession becomes 'calling,' and work is
valued as a religious path to salvation.
Calvin's idea of predestination, far from leading in practice to
idle apathy, prodded man further into the rhythm of modern
work. It was necessary to act in the world rationally and methodi-
cally and continuously and hard, as if one were certain of being
among those elected. It is God's will that everyone must work,
but it is not God's will that one should lust after the fruits even
of one's own labor; they must be reinvested to allow and to spur
still more labor. Not contemplation, but strong-willed, austere,
WORK 217
untiring work, based on religious conviction, will ease guilt and
lead to the good and pious life.
The 'this-worldly asceticism' of early Protestantism placed a
premium upon and justified the styles of conduct and feeling re-
quired in its agents by modem capitalism. The Protestant sects
encouraged and justified the social development of a type of
man capable of ceaseless, methodical labor. The psychology of
the religious man and of the economic man thus coincided, as
Max Weber has shown, and at their point of coincidence the
sober bourgeois entrepreneur lived in and through his work.
Locke's notion that labor was the origin of individual owner-
ship and the source of all economic value, as elaborated by Adam
Smith, became a keystone of the liberal economic system: work
was now a controlling factor in the wealth of nations, but it was
a soulless business, a harsh justification for the toiling grind of
nineteenth-century populations, and for the economic man, who
was motivated in work by the money he earned.
But there was another concept of work which evolved in the
Renaissance; some men of that exuberant time saw work as a
spur rather than a drag on man's development as man. By his
own activity, man could accomplish anything; through work,
man became creator. How better could he fill his hours? Leo-
nardo da Vinci rejoiced in creative labor; Bruno glorified work
as an arm against adversity and a tool of conquest.
During the nineteenth century there began to be reactions
against the Utilitarian meaning assigned to work by classical
economics, reactions that drew upon this Renaissance exuber-
ance. Men, such as Tolstoy, Carlyle, Ruskin, and William Morris,
turned backward; others, such as Marx and Engels, looked for-
ward. But both groups drew upon the Renaissance view of man
as tool user. The division of labor and the distribution of its
product, as well as the intrinsic meaning of work as purposive
human activity, are at issue in these nineteenth-century specula-
tions. Ruskin's ideal, set against the capitalist organization of
work, rested on a pre-capitalist society of free artisans whose
work is at once a necessity for livelihood and an act of art that
brings inner calm. He glorified what he supposed was in the work
of the medieval artisan; he believed that the total product of
218 STYLES OF LIFE
work should go to the worker. Profit on capital is an injustice and,
moreover, to strive for profit for its own sake blights the soul
and puts man into a frenzy.
In Marx we encounter a full-scale analysis of the meaning of
work in human development as well as of the distortions of this
development in capitalist society. Here the essence of the human
being rests upon his work: 'What [individuals] . . . are . . . co-
incides with their production, both with what they produce and
with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends
on the material conditions determining their production.' Capi-
talist production, thought Marx, who accepted the humanist ideal
of classic German idealism of the all-round personality, has
twisted men into alien and specialized animal-like and deperson-
alized creatures.
Historically, most views of work have ascribed to it an extrinsic
meaning. R. H. Tawney refers to 'the distinction made by the
philosophers of classical antiquity between liberal and servile
occupations, the medieval insistence that riches exist for man,
not man for riches. Ruskin's famous outburst, "there is no wealth
but life," the argument of the Socialist who urges that production
should be organized for service, not for profit, are but different
attempts to emphasize the instrumental character of economic
activities by reference to an ideal which is held to express the
true nature of man.' But there are also those who ascribe to work
an intrinsic worth. All philosophies of work may be divided into
these two views, although in a curious way Carlyle managed to
combine the two.
I, The various forms of Protestantism, which (along with clas-
sical economics ) have been the most influential doctrines in mod-
ern times, see work activity as ulterior to religious sanctions;
gratifications from work are not intrinsic to the activity and ex-
perience, but are religious rewards. By work one gains a religious
status and assures oneself of being among the elect. If work is
compulsive it is due to the painful guilt that arises when one
does not work.
II. The Renaissance view of work, which sees it as intrinsically
meaningful, is centered in the technical craftsmanship— the man-
ual and mental operations— of the work process itself; it sees the
WORK 219
reasons for work in the work itself and not in any ulterior realm
or consequence. Not income, not way of salvation, not status,
not power over other people, but the technical processes them-
selves are gratifying.
Neither of these views, however— the secularized gospel of
work as compulsion, nor the humanist view of work as crafts-
manship—now has great influence among modem populations.
For most employees, work has a generally unpleasant quality. If
there is little Calvinist compulsion to work among propertyless
factory workers and file clerks, there is also little Renaissance
exuberance in the work of the insurance clerk, freight handler,
or department-store saleslady. If the shoe salesman or the tex-
tile executive gives little thought to the religious meaning of his
labor, certainly few telephone operators or receptionists or school-
teachers experience from their work any Ruskinesque inner calm.
Such joy as creative work may carry is more and more limited
to a small minority. For the white-collar masses, as for wage
earners generally, work seems to serve neither God nor what-
ever they may experience as divine in themselves. In them there
is no taut will-to-work, and few positive gratifications from their
daily round.
The gospel of work has been central to the historic tradition
of America, to its image of itself, and to the images the rest of
the world has of America. The crisis and decline of that gospel
are of wide and deep meaning. On every hand, we hear, in the
words of Wade Shortleff for example, that 'the aggressiveness
and enthusiasm which marked other generations is withering,
and in its stead we find the philosophy that attaining and hold-
ing a job is not a challenge but a necessary evil. When work be-
comes just work, activity undertaken only for reason of sub-
sistence, the spirit which fired our nation to its present greatness
has died to a spark. An ominous apathy cloaks the smoldering
discontent and restlessness of the management men of to-
morrow.'
To understand the significance of this gospel and its decline,
we must understand the very spirit of twentieth-century America.
That the historical work ethic of the old middle-class entrepre-
neurs has not deeply gripped the people of the new society is
one of the most crucial psychological implications of the strue-
220 STYLES OF LIFE
tural decline of the old middle classes. The new middle class,
despite the old middle-class origin of many of its members, has
never been deeply involved in the older work ethic, and on this
point has been from the beginning non-bourgeois in mentality.
At the same time, the second historically important model of
meaningful work and gratification— craftsmanship— has never be-
longed to the new middle classes, either by tradition or by the na-
ture of their work. Nevertheless, the model of craftsmanship lies,
however vaguely, back of most serious studies of worker dissatis-
faction today, of most positive statements of worker gratification,
from Ruskin and Tolstoy to Bergson and Sorel. Therefore, it is
worth considering in some detail, in order that we may then
gauge in just what respects its realization is impossible for the
modem white-collar worker.
2. The Ideal of Craftsmanship
Craftsmanship as a fully idealized model of work gratification
involves six major features: There is no ulterior motive in work
other than the product being made and the processes of its cre-
ation. The details of daily work are meaningful because they are
not detached in the worker's mind from the product of the work.
The worker is free to control his own working action. The crafts-
man is thus able to learn from his work; and to use and develop
his capacities and skills in its prosecution. There is no split of
work and play, or work and culture. The craftsman's way of
livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living.
I. The hope in good work, William Morris remarked, is hope
of product and hope of pleasure in the work itself; the supreme
concern, the whole attention, is with the quality of the product
and the skill of its making. There is an inner relation between
the craftsman and the thing he makes, from the image he first
forms of it through its completion, which goes beyond the mere
legal relations of property and makes the craftsman's will-to-work
spontaneous and even exuberant.
Other motives and results— money or reputation or salvation-
are subordinate. It is not essential to the practice of the craft
ethic that one necessarily improves one's status either in the re-
WORK 221
ligious community or in the community in general. Work grati-
fication is such that a man may live in a kind of quiet passion 'for
his work alone.'
II. In most statements of craftsmanship, there is a confusion
between its technical and aesthetic conditions and the legal
(property) organization of the worker and the product. What is
actually necessary for work-as-craftsmanship, however, is that
the tie between the product and the producer be psychologically
possible; if the producer does not legally own the product he
must own it psychologically in the sense that he knows what
goes into it by way of skill, sweat, and material and that his own
skill and sweat are visible to him. Of course, if legal conditions
are such that the tie between the work and the worker's material
advantage is transparent, this is a further gratification, but it is
subordinate to that workmanship which would continue of its
own will even if not paid for.
The craftsman has an image of the completed product, and
even though he does not make it all, he sees the place of his part
in the whole, and thus understands the meaning of his exertion
in terms of that whole. The satisfaction he has in the result in-
fuses the means of achieving it, and in this way his work is not
only meaningful to him but also partakes of the consummatory
satisfaction he has in the product. If work, in some of its phases,
has the taint of travail and vexation and mechanical drudgery,
still the craftsman is carried over these junctures by keen an-
ticipation. He may even gain positive satisfaction from encoun-
tering a resistance and conquering it, feeling his work and will
as powerfully victorious over the recalcitrance of materials and
the malice of things. Indeed, without this resistance he would
gain less satisfaction in being finally victorious over that which
at first obstinately resists his will.
George Mead has stated this kind of aesthetic experience as
involving the power 'to catch the enjoyment that belongs to the
consummation, the outcome, of an undertaking and to give to
the implements, the objects that are instrumental in the under-
taking, and to the acts that compose it something of the joy and
satisfaction that suffuse its successful accomplishment.'
222 STYLES OF LIFE
in. The workman is free to begin his work according to his
own plan and, during the activity by which it is shaped, he is
free to modify its form and the manner of its creation. In both
these senses, Henri De Man observed, 'plan and performance are
one,' and the craftsman is master of the activity and of himself
in the process. This continual joining of plan and activity brings
even more firmly together the consummation of work and its
instrumental activities, infusing the latter with the joy of the
former. It also means that his sphere of independent action is
large and rational to him. He is responsible for its outcome and
free to assume that responsibility. His problems and difficulties
must be solved by him, in terms of the shape he wants the final
outcome to assume.
IV. The craftsman's work is thus a means of developing his
skill, as well as a means of developing himself as a man. It is not
that self-development is an ulterior goal, but that such develop-
ment is the cumulative result obtained by devotion to and prac-
tice of his skills. As he gives it the quality of his own mind and
skill, he is also further developing his own nature; in this simple
sense, he lives in and through his work, which confesses and
reveals him to the world.
v. In the craftsman pattern there is no split of work and play,
of work and culture. If play is supposed to be an activity, exer-
cised for its own sake, having no aim other than gratifying the
actor, then work is supposed to be an activity performed to
create economic value or for some other ulterior result. Play is
something you do to be happily occupied, but if work occupies
you happily, it is also play, although it is also serious, just as
play is to the child. 'Really free work, the work of a composer,
for example,' Marx once wrote of Fourier's notions of work and
play, 'is damned serious work, intense strain.' The simple self-
expression of play and the creation of ulterior value of work are
combined in work-as-craftsmanship. The craftsman or artist ex-
presses himself at the same time and in the same act as he cre-
ates value. His work is a poem in action. He is at work and at
play in the same act.
WORK 223
'Work' and 'culture' are not, as Gentile has held, separate
spheres, the first dealing with means, the second with ends in
themselves; as Tilgher, Sorel, and others have indicated, either
work or culture may be an end in itself, a means, or may contain
segments of both ends and means. In the craft model of activity,
'consumption' and 'production' are blended in the same act;
active craftsmanship, which is both play and work, is the medium
of culture; and for the craftsman there is no split between the
worlds of culture and work.
VI. The craftsman's work is the mainspring of the only life
he knows; he does not flee from work into a separate sphere of
leisure; he brings to his non-working hours the values and quali-
ties developed and employed in his working time. His idle con-
versation is shop talk; his friends follow the same lines of work
as he, and share a kinship of feeling and thought. The leisure
William Morris called for was 'leisure to think about our work,
that faithful daily companion. . .'
In order to give his work the freshness of creativity, the crafts-
man must at times open himself up to those influences that only
affect us when our attentions are relaxed. Thus for the crafts-
man, apart from mere animal rest, leisure may occur in such
intermittent periods as are necessary for individuality in his work.
As he brings to his leisure the capacity and problems of his work,
so he brings back into work those sensitivities he would not gain
in periods of high, sustained tension necessary for solid work.
'The world of art,' wrote Paul Bourget, speaking of America,
'requires less self-consciousness— an impulse of life which forgets
itself, the alternation of dreamy idleness with fervid execution.'
The same point is made by Henry James, in his essay on Balzac,
who remarks that we have practically lost the faculty of atten-
tion, meaning . . . 'that unstrenuous, brooding sort of attention
required to produce or appreciate works of art.' Even rest, which
is not so directly connected with work itself as a condition of
creativity, is animal rest, made secure and freed from anxiety
by virtue of work done— in Tilgher's words, 'a sense of peace and
calm which flows from all well-regulated, disciplined work done
with a quiet and contented mind.'
224 STYLES OF LIFE
In constructing this model of craftsmanship, we do not mean
to imply that there ever was a community in which work car-
ried all these meanings. Whether the medieval artisan approxi-
mated the model as closely as some writers seem to assume, we
do not know; but we entertain serious doubts that this is so; we
lack enough psychological knowledge of medieval populations
properly to judge. At any rate, for our purposes it is enough to
know that at different times and in different occupations, the
work men do has carried one or more features of craftsmanship.
With such a model in mind, a glance at the occupational world
of the modern worker is enough to make clear that practically
none of these aspects are now relewmt to modern work experi-
ence. The model of craftsmanship has become an anachronism.
We use the model as an explicit ideal in terms of which we can
summarize the working conditions and the personal meaning
work has in modern work-worlds, and especially to white-collar
people.
3. The Conditions of Modern Work
As practice, craftsmanship has largely been trivialized into
'hobbies,' part of leisure not of work; or ff work— a marketable
activity— it is the work of scattered mechanics in handicraft
trades, and of professionals who manage to remain free. As ethic,
craftsmanship is confined to minuscule groups of privileged pro-
fessionals and intellectuals.
The entire shift from the rural world of the small entrepreneur
to the urban society of the dependent employee has instituted
the property conditions of alienation from product and processes
of work. Of course, dependent occupations vary in the extent
of initiative they allow and invite, and many self-employed enter-
prisers are neither as independent nor as enterprising as com-
monly supposed. Nevertheless, in almost any job, the employee
sells a degree of his independence; his working life is within the
domain of others; the level of his skills that are used and the
areas in which he may exercise independent decisions are subject
to management by others. Probably at least ten or twelve million
people worked during the 'thirties at tasks below the skill level
of which they were easily capable; and, as school attendance in-
WORK 225
creases and more jobs are routinized, the number of people who
must work below their capacities will increase.
There is considerable truth in the statement that those who
find free expression of self in their work are those who securely
own the property with which they work, or those whose work-
freedom does not entail the ownership of property. 'Those who
have no money work sloppily under the name of sabotage,' writes
Charles Peguy, 'and those who have money work sloppily, a
counter and different sloppiness, under the name of luxury. And
thus culture no longer has any medium through which it might
infiltrate. There no longer exists that marvelous unity true of all
ancient societies, where he who produced and he who bought
equally loved and knew culture.'
The objective alienation of man from the product and the
process of work is entailed by the legal framework of modern
capitalism and the modern division of labor. The worker does
not own the product or the tools of his production. In the labor
contract he sells his time, energy, and skill into the power of
others. To understand self-alienation we need not accept the
metaphysical view that man's self is most crucially expressed in
work-activity. In all work involving the personality market, as
we have seen, one's personality and personal traits become part
of the means of production. In this sense a person instrumental-
izes and externalizes intimate features of his person and disposi-
tion. In certain white-collar areas, the rise of personality markets
has carried self and social alienation to explicit extremes.
Thoreau, who spoke for the small entrepreneur, objected, in
the middle of the nineteenth century, 'to the division of labor
since it divided the worker, not merely the work, reduced him
from a man to an operative, and enriched the few at the expense
of the many.' 'It destroyed,' wrote F. O. Matthiessen, 'the poten-
tial balance of his [Thoreau's] agrarian world, one of the main
ideals of which was the union of labor and culture.'
The detailed division of labor means, of course, that the indi-
vidual does not carry through the whole process of work to its
final product; but it also means that under many modern condi-
tions the process itself is invisible to him. The product as the
goal of his work is legally and psychologically detached from
him, and this detachment cuts the nerve of meaning which work
226 STYLES OF LIFE
might otherwise gain from its technical processes. Even on the
professional levels of white-collar work, not to speak of wage-
work and the lower white-collar tasks, the chance to develop
and use individual rationality is often destroyed by the centrali-
zation of decision and the formal rationality that bureaucracy
entails. The expropriation which modern work organization has
carried through thus goes far beyond the expropriation of own-
ership; rationality itself has been expropriated from work and
any total view and understanding of its process. No longer free
to plan his work, much less to modify the plan to which he is
subordinated, the individual is to a great extent managed and
manipulated in his work.
The world market, of which Marx spoke as the alien power
over men, has in many areas been replaced by the bureaucratized
enterprise. Not the market as such but centralized administrative
decisions determine when men work and how fast. Yet the more
and the harder men work, the more they build up that which
dominates their work as an alien force, the commodity; so also,
the more and the harder the white-collar man works, the more
he builds up the enterprise outside himself, which is, as we have
seen, duly made a fetish and thus indirectly justified. The enter-
prise is not the institutional shadow of great men, as perhaps it
seemed under the old captain of industry; nor is it the instrument
through which men realize themselves in work, as in small-scale
production. The enterprise is an impersonal and alien Name,
and the more that is placed in it, the less is placed in man.
As tool becomes machine, man is estranged from the intel-
lectual potentialities and aspects of work; and each individual
is routinized in the name of increased and cheaper per unit pro-
ductivity. The whole unit and meaning of time is modified;
man's 'life-time,' wrote Marx, is transformed into 'working-time.'
In tying down individuals to particular tasks and jobs, the divi-
sion of labor 'lays the foundation of that all-engrossing system of
specializing and sorting men, that development in a man of one
single faculty at the expense of all other faculties, which caused
A. Ferguson, the master of Adam Smith, to exclaim: "We make
a nation of Helots, and have no free citizens." '
The introduction of office machinery and sales devices has
been mechanizing the office and the salesroom, the two big lo-
WORK 227
cales of white-collar work. Since the 'twenties it has increased
the division of white-collar labor, recomposed personnel, and
lowered skill levels. Routine operations in minutely subdivided
organizations have replaced the bustling interest of work in well-
known groups. Even on managerial and professional levels, the
growth of rational bureaucracies has made work more like fac-
tory production. The managerial demiurge is constantly further-
ing all these trends: mechanization, more minute division of
labor, the use of less skilled and less expensive workers.
In its early stages, a new division of labor may specialize men
in such a way as to increase their levels of skill; but later, espe-
cially when whole operations are split and mechanized, such
division develops certain faculties at the expense of others and
narrows all of them. And as it comes more fully under mechani-
zation and centralized management, it levels men off again as
automatons. Then there are a few specialists and a mass of
automatons; both integrated by the authority which makes them
interdependent and keeps each in his own routine. Thus, in the
division of labor, the open development and free exercise of skills
are managed and closed.
The alienating conditions of modem work now include the
salaried employees as well as the wage-workers. There are few,
if any, features of wage-work (except heavy toil— which is de-
creasingly a factor in wage-work) that do not also characterize
at least some white-collar work. For here, too, the human traits
of the individual, from his physique to his psychic disposition,
become units in the functionally rational calculation of managers.
None of the features of work as craftsmanship is prevalent in
office and salesroom, and, in addition, some features of white-
collar work, such as the personality market, go well beyond the
alienating conditions of wage-work.
Yet, as Henri De Man has pointed out, we cannot assume that
the employee makes comparisons between the ideal of work as
craftsmanship and his own working experience. We cannot com-
pare the idealized portrait of the craftsman with that of the auto
worker and on that basis impute any psychological state to the
auto worker. We cannot fruitfully compare the psychological
condition of the old merchant's assistant with the modem sales-
lady, or the old-fashioned bookkeeper with the IBM machine
228 STYLES OF LIFE
attendant. For the historical destruction of craftsmanship and of
the old oflBce does not enter the consciousness of the modern
wage-worker or white-collar employee; much less is their absence
felt by him as a crisis, as it might have been if, in the course of
the last generation, his father or mother had been in the craft
condition— but, statistically speaking, they have not been. It is
slow historical fact, long gone by in any dramatic consequence
and not of psychological relevance to the present generation.
Only the psychological imagination of the historian makes it pos-
sible to write of such comparisons as if they were of psychologi-
cal import. The craft life would be immediately available as a
fact of their consciousness only if in the lifetime of the modem
employees they had experienced a shift from the one condition
to the other, which they have not; or if they had grasped it as
an ideal meaning of work, which they have not.
But if the work white-collar people do is not connected with
its resultant product, and if there is no intrinsic connection be-
tween work and the rest of their life, then they must accept their
work as meaningless in itself, perform it with more or less dis-
gruntlement, and seek meanings elsewhere. Of their work, as of
all of our lives, it can truly be said, in Henri Bergson's words,
that: 'The greater part of our time we live outside ourselves,
hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost, a
colourless shadow. . . Hence we live for the external world
rather than for ourselves; we speak rather than think; we are
acted rather than act ourselves. To act freely is to recover pos-
session of oneself, . .'
If white-collar people are not free to control their working
actions they, in time, habitually submit to the orders of others
and, in so far as they try to act freely, do so in other spheres. If
they do not learn from their work or develop themselves in doing
it, in time, they cease trying to do so, often having no interest in
self-development even in other areas. If there is a split between
their work and play, and their work and culture, they admit that
split as a common-sense fact of existence. If their way of earning
a living does not infuse their mode of living, they try to build
their real life outside their work. Work becomes a sacrifice of
time, necessary to building a life outside of it.
WORK 229
4. Frames of Acceptance
Underneath virtually all experience of work today, there is a
fatalistic feeling that work per se is unpleasant. One type of
work, or one particular job, is contrasted with another type, ex-
perienced or imagined, within the present world of work; judg-
ments are rarely made about the world of work as presently
organized as against some other way of organizing it; so also,
satisfaction from work is felt in comparison with the satisfac-
tions of other jobs.
We do not know what proportions of the U.S. white-collar
strata are 'satisfied' by their work and, more important, we do
not know what being satisfied means to them. But it is possible
to speculate fruitfully about such questions.
We do have the results of some questions, necessarily crude,
regarding feelings about present jobs. As in almost every other
area, when sponge questions are asked of a national cross-section,
white-collar people, meaning here clerical and sales employees,
are in the middle zones. They stand close to the national average
(64 per cent asserting they find their work interesting and en-
joyable 'all the time'), while more of the professionals and execu-
tives claim interest and enjoyment (85 per cent), and fewer of
the factory workers (41 per cent) do so.
Within the white-collar hierarchy, job satisfaction seems to
follow the hierarchical levels; in one study, for example, 86 per
cent of the professionals, 74 per cent of the managerial, 42 per
cent of the commercial employees, stated general satisfaction.
This is also true of wage-worker levels of skill: 56 per cent of
the skilled, but 48 per cent of the semi-skilled, are satisfied.
Such figures tell us very little, since we do not know what the
questions mean to the people who answer them, or whether they
mean the same thing to different strata. However, work satisfac-
tion is related to income and, if we had measures, we might find
that it is also related to status as well as to power. What such
questions probably measure are invidious judgments of the indi-
vidual's standing with reference to other individuals. And the
aspects of work, the terms of such comparisons, must be made
clear.
230 STYLES OF LIFE
Under modern conditions, the direct technical processes of
work have been decHning in meaning for the mass of employees,
but other features of work— income, power, status— have come
to the fore. Apart from the technical operations and the skills
involved, work is a source of income; the amount, level, and
security of pay, and what one's income history has been are part
X)f work's meaning. Work is also a means of gaining status, at the
place of work, and in the general community. Different types of
work and different occupational levels carry differential status
values. These again are part of the meaning of the job. And also
work carries various sorts of power, over materials and tools and
machines, but, more crucially now, over other people.
I. Income: The economic motives for work are now its only
firm rationale. Work now has no other legitimating symbols,
although certainly other gratifications and discontents are associ-
ated with it. The division of labor and the routinization of many
job areas are reducing work to a commodity, of which money
has become the only common denominator. To the worker who
cannot receive technical gratifications from his work, its market
value is all there is to it. The only significant occupational move-
ment in the United States, the trade unions, have the pure and
simple ideology of alienated work: more and more money for
less and less work. There are, of course, other demands, but they
can be only 'fixed up' to lessen the cry for more money. The
sharp focus upon money is part and parcel of the lack of in-
trinsic meaning that work has come to have.
Underlying the modern approach to work there seems to be
some vague feeling that 'one should earn one's own living,' a
kind of Protestant undertow, attenuated into a secular conven-
tion. 'When work goes,' as H. A. Overstreet, a job psychologist
writing of the slump, puts it, 'we know that the tragedy is more
than economic. It is psychological. It strikes at the center of our
personality. It takes from us something that rightly belongs to
every self-respecting human being.' But income security— the
fear of unemployment or under-employment— is more important.
An undertow of anxiety about sickness, accident, or old age must
support eagerness for work, and gratification may be based on
the compulsion to relieve anxiety by working hard. Widespread
WORK 231
unemployment, or fear of it, may even make an employee hap-
pily thankful for any job, contented to be at any kind of work
when all around there are many workless, worried people. If
satisfaction rests on relative status, there is here an invidious ele-
ment that increases it. It is across this ground tone of convention
and fear, built around work as a source of income, that other
motives to work and other factors of satisfaction are available.
n. Status: Income and income security lead to other things,
among them, status. With the decline of technical gratification,
the employee often tries to center such meaning as he finds in
work on other features of the job. Satisfaction in work often rests
upon status satisfactions from work associations. As a social role
played in relation to other people, work may become a source
of self-esteem, on the job, among co-workers, superiors, subor-
dinates, and customers, if any; and off the job, among friends,
family, and community at large. The fact of doing one kind of
job rather than another and doing one's job with skill and dis-
patch may be a source of self-esteem. For the man or woman
lonely in the city, the mere fact of meeting people at the place
of work may be a positive thing. Even anonymous work contacts
in large enterprises may be highly esteemed by those who feel
too closely bound by family and neighborhood. There is a grati-
fication from working downtown in the city, uptown in the
smaller urban center; there is the glamour of being attached to
certain firms.
It is the status conferred on the exercise of given skills and on
given income levels that is often the prime source of gratification
or humiliation. The psychological effect of a detailed division of
labor depends upon whether or not the worker has been down-
graded, and upon whether or not his associates have also been
downgraded. Pride in skill is relative to the skills he has exer-
cised in the past and to the skills others exercise, and thus to
the evaluation of his skills by other people whose opinions count.
In like manner, the amount of money he receives may be seen
by the employee and by others as the best gauge of his worth.
This may be all the more true when relations are increasingly
'objectified' and do not require intimate knowledge. For then
there may be anxiety to keep secret the amount of money earned.
232 STYLES OF LIFE
and even to suggest to others that one earns more. 'Who earns
the most?' asks Erich Engelhard. 'That is the important question,
that is the gauge of all differentiations and the yardstick of the
moneyed classes. We do not wish to show how we work, for in
most cases others will soon have learned our tricks. This explains
all the bragging. "The work I have to do! " exclaims one employee
when he has only three letters to write. . . This boastfulness can
be explained by a drive which impels certain people to evaluate
their occupations very low in comparison with their intellectual
aspirations but very high compared with the occupations of
others.'
in. Power: Power over the technical aspects of work has been
stripped from the individual, first, by the development of the
market, which determines how and when he works, and second,
by the bureaucratization of the work sphere, which subjects work
operations to discipline. By virtue of these two alien forces the
individual has lost power over the technical operations of his
own work life.
But the exercise of power over other people has been elabo-
rated. In so far as modem organizations of work are large scale,
they are hierarchies of power, into which various occupations
are fitted. The fact that one takes orders as well as gives them
does not necessarily decrease the positive gratification achieved
through the exercise of power on the job.
Status and power, as features of work gratification, are often
blended; self-esteem may be based on the social power exercised
in the course of work; victory over the will of another may
greatly expand one's self-estimation. But the very opposite may
also be true: in an almost masochistic way, people may be grati-
fied by subordination on the job. We have already seen how
ofiBce women in lower positions of authority are liable to identify
with men in higher authority, transferring from prior family con-
nections or projecting to future family relations.
All four aspects of occupation— skill, power, income, and
status— must be taken into account to understand the meaning
of work and the sources of its gratification. Any one of them may
become the foremost aspect of the job, and in various combina-
WORK 233
tions each is usually in the consciousness of the employee. To
achieve and to exercise the power and status that higher income
entails may be the very definition of satisfaction in work, and
this satisfaction may have nothing whatsoever to do with the
craft experience as the inherent need and full development of
human activity.
5. The Morale of the Cheerful Robots
The institutions in which modern work is organized have come
about by drift— many little schemes adding up to unexpected
results— and by plan— efforts paying off as expected. The aliena-
tion of the individual from the product and the process of his
work came about, in the first instance, as a result of the drfft
of modern capitalism. Then, Frederick Taylor, and other sci-
entific managers, raised the division of labor to the level of
planful management. By centralizing plans, as well as introduc-
ing further divisions of skill, they further routinized work; by
consciously building upon the drift, in factory and in office, they
have carried further certain of its efficient features.
Twenty years ago, H. Dubreuil, a foreign observer of U.S. in-
dustry, could write that Taylor's 'insufficiency' shows up when
he comes to approach 'the inner forces contained in the worker's
soul. . .' That is no longer true. The new ( social ) scientific man-
agement begins precisely where Taylor left off or was incom-
plete; students of 'human relations in industry' have studied not
lighting and clean toUets, but social cliques and good morale.
For in so far as human factors are involved in efficient and un-
troubled production, the managerial demiurge must bring them
under control. So, in factory and in office, the world to be man-
aged increasingly includes the social setting, the human affairs,
and the personality of man as a worker.
Management effort to create job enthusiasm reflects the un-
happy unwillingness of employees to work spontaneously at their
routinized tasks; it indicates recognition of the lack of spontane-
ous will to work for the ulterior ends available; it also indicates
that it is more difficult to have happy employees when the
chances to climb the skill and social hierarchies are slim. These
are underlying reasons why the Protestant ethic, a work com-
234 STYLES OF LIFE
pulsion, is replaced by the conscious efiForts of Personnel Depart-
ments to create morale. But the present-day concern with em-
ployee morale and work enthusiasm has other sources than the
meaningless character of much modern work. It is also a re-
sponse to several decisive shifts in American society, particularly
in its higher business circles: the enormous scale and complexity
of modem business, its obviously vast and concentrated power;
the rise of successfully competing centers of loyalty— the unions-
over the past dozen years, with their inevitable focus upon power
relations on the job; the enlargement of the liberal administrative
state at the hands of politically successful New and Fair Deals;
and the hostile atmosphere surrounding business during the big
slump.
These developments have caused a shift in the outlook of cer-
tain sections of the business world, which in The New Men of
Power I have called the shift from practical to sophisticated con-
servatism. The need to develop new justifications, and the fact
that increased power has not yet been publicly justified, give
rise to a groping for more telling symbols of justification among
the more sophisticated business spokesmen, who have felt them-
selves to be a small island in a politically hostile sea of property-
less employees. Studies of Tiuman relations in industry' are an
ideological part of this groping. The managers are interested in
such studies because of the hope of lowering production costs,
of easing tensions inside their plants, of finding new symbols to
justify the concentrated power they exercise in modern society.
To secure and increase the will to work, a new ethic that en-
dows work with more than an economic incentive is needed.
During war, managers have appealed to nationalism; they have
appealed in the name of the firm or branch of the office or fac-
tory, seeking to tap the animistic identifications of worker with
work-place and tools in an effort to strengthen his identification
with the company. They have repeatedly written that 'job en-
thusiasm is good business,' that 'job enthusiasm is a hallmark
of the American Way.' But they have not yet found a really
sound ideology.
What they are after is 'something in the employee' outwardly
manifested in a 'mail must go through' attitude, 'the "we" atti-
tude,' 'spontaneous discipline,' 'employees smiling and cheerful.'
WORK 235
They want, for example, to point out to banking employees 'their
importance to banking and banking's importance to the general
economy.' In conferences of management associations (1947)
one hears: 'There is one thing more that is wonderful about the
human body. Make the chemical in the vial a little different and
you have a person who is loyal. He likes you, and when mishaps
come he takes a lot from you and the company, because you have
been so good to him; you have changed the structure of his blood.
You have to put into his work and environment the things that
change the chemical that stimulates the action, so that he is
loyal and productive. . . Somebody working under us won't
know why, but . . . when they are asked where they work and
why, they say "I work with this company. I like it there and
my boss is really one to work with." '
The over-all formula of advice that the new ideology of 'human
relations in business' contains runs to this effect: to make the
worker happy, efBcient, and co-operative, you must make the
managers intelligent, rational, knowledgeable. It is the perspec-
tive of a managerial elite, disguised in the pseudo-objective lan-
guage of engineers. It is advice to the personnel manager to relax
his authoritative manner and widen his manipulative grip over
the employees by understanding them better and countering their
informal solidarities against management and exploiting these
solidarities for smoother and less troublesome managerial effi-
ciency.
Current managerial attempts to create job enthusiasm, to para-
phrase Marx's comment on Proudhon, are attempts to conquer
work alienation within the bounds of work alienation. In the
meantime, whatever satisfaction alienated men gain from work
occurs within the framework of alienation; whatever satisfaction
they gain from life occurs outside the boundaries of work; work
and life are sharply split.
6. The Big Split
Only in the last half century has leisure been widely available
to the weary masses of the big city. Before then, there was leisure
only for those few who were socially trained to use and enjoy
it; the rest of the populace was left on lower and bleaker
236 STYLES OF LIFE
levels of sensibility, taste, and feeling. Then as the sphere of
leisure was won for more and more of the people, the techniques
of mass production were applied to amusement as they had been
to the sphere of work. The most ostensible feature of American
social life today, and one of the most frenzied, is its mass leisure
activities. The most important characteristic of all these activi-
ties is that they astonish, excite, and distract but they do not
enlarge reason or feeling, or allow spontaneous dispositions to
unfold creatively.
What is psychologically important in this shift to mass leisure
is that the old middle-class work ethic— the gospel of work— has
been replaced in the society of employees by a leisure ethic, and
this replacement has involved a sharp, almost absolute split be-
tween work and leisure. Now work itself is judged in terms of
leisure values. The sphere of leisure provides the standards by
which work is judged; it lends to work such meanings as work
has.
Alienation in work means that the most alert hours of one's
life are sacrificed to the making of money with which to 'live.'
Alienation means boredom and the frustration of potentially
creative effort, of the productive sides of personality. It means
that while men must seek all values that matter to them outside
of work, they must be serious during work: they may not laugh
or sing or even talk, they must follow the rules and not violate
the fetish of 'the enterprise.' In short, they must be serious and
steady about something that does not mean anything to them,
and moreover during the best hours of their day, the best hours
of their life. Leisure time thus comes to mean an unserious free-
dom from the authoritarian seriousness of the job.
The split of work from leisure and the greater importance of
leisure in the striving consciousness of modern man run through
the whole fabric of twentieth-century America, affect the mean-
ingful experiences of work, and set popular goals and day-
dreams. Over the last forty years, Leo Lowenthal has shown,
as the 'idols of work' have declined, the 'idols of leisure' have
arisen. Now th° selection of heroes for popular biography ap-
pearing in mass magazines has shifted from business, profes-
sional, and political figures— successful in the sphere of produc-
tion—to those successful in entertainment, leisure, and consump-
WORK 237
lion. The movie star and the baseball player have replaced the
industrial magnate and the political man. Today, the displayed
characteristics of popular idols 'can all be integrated around
the concept of the consumer.' And the faculties of reflection,
imagination, dream, and desire, so far as they exist, do not now
move in the sphere of concrete, practical work experience.
Work is split from the rest of life, especially from the spheres
of conscious enjoyment; nevertheless, most men and many
women must work. So work is an unsatisfactory means to ulterior
ends lying somewhere in the sphere of leisure. The necessity to
work and the alienation from it make up its grind, and the more
grind there is, the more need to find relief in the jumpy or
dreamy models available in modern leisure. Leisure contains all
good things and all goals dreamed of and actively pursued. The
dreariest part of life, R. H. Tawney remarks, is where and when
you work, the gayest where and when you consume.
Each day men sell little pieces of themselves in order to try to
buy them back each night and week end with the coin of 'fun.'
With amusement, with love, with movies, with vicarious inti-
macy, they pull themselves into some sort of whole again, and
now they are different men. Thus, the cycle of work and leisure
gives rise to two quite different images of self: the everyday
image, based upon work, and the holiday image, based upon
leisure. The holiday image is often heavily tinged with aspired-to
and dreamed-of features and is, of course, fed by mass-media per-
sonalities and happenings. 'The rhythm of the week end, with its
birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end,' Scott Fitz-
gerald wrote, 'followed the rhythm of Hfe and was a substitute
for it.' The week end, having nothing in common with the work-
ing week, lifts men and women out of the gray level tone of
everyday work life, and forms a standard with which the work-
ing life is contrasted.
As the work sphere declines in meaning and gives no inner di-
rection and rhythm to life, so have community and kinship
circles declined as ways of 'fixing man into society.' In the old
craft model, work sphere and family coincided; before the In-
dustrial Revolution, the home and the workshop were one. To-
day, this is so only in certain smaller-bourgeois families, and
there it is often seen by the young as repression. One result ol
238 STYLES OF LIFE
the division of labor is to take the breadwinner out of the home,
segregating work life and home life. This has often meant that
work becomes the means for the maintenance of the home, and
the home the means for refitting the worker to go back to work.
But with the decline of the home as the center of psychological
life and the lowering of the hours of work, the sphere of leisure
and amusement takes over the home's functions.
No longer is the framework within which a man lives fixed by
traditional institutions. Mass communications replace tradition as
a framework of life. Being thus afloat, the metropolitan man finds
a new anchorage in the spectator sports, the idols of the mass
media, and other machineries of amusement.
So the leisure sphere— and the machinery of amusement in
terms of which it is now organized— becomes the center of char-
acter-forming influences, of identification models: it is what one
man has in common with another; it is a continuous interest. The
machinery of amusement, Henry Durant remarks, focuses atten-
tion and desires upon 'those aspects of our life which are divorced
from work and on people who are significant, not in terms of
what they have achieved, but in terms of having money and time
to spend.'
The amusement of hollow people rests on their own hollowness
and does not fill it up; it does not calm or relax them, as old
middle-class frolics and jollification may have done; it does not
re-create their spontaneity in work, as in the craftsman model.
Their leisure diverts them from the restless grind of their work
by the absorbing grind of passive enjoyment of glamour and
thrills. To modern man leisure is the way to spend money, work
is the way to make it. When the two compete, leisure wins hands
down.
11
The Status Panic
r RESTiGE involves at least two persons: one to claim it and an-
other to honor the claim. The bases on which various people
raise prestige claims, and the reasons others honor these claims,
include property and birth, occupation and education, income
and power— in fact almost anything that may invidiously distin-
guish one person from another. In the status system of a society
these claims are organized as rules and expectations which regu-
late who successfully claims prestige, from whoni, in what ways,
and on what basis. The level of self-esteem enjoyed by given
individuals is more or less set by this status system.
The extent to which claims for prestige are honored, and by
whom they are honored, may vary widely. Some of those from
whom an individual claims prestige may honor his claims, others
may not; some deferences that are given may express genuine
feelings of esteem; others may be expedient strategies for ulterior
ends. A society may, in fact, contain many hierarchies of pres-
tige, each with its own typical bases and areas of bestowal, or
one hierarchy in which everyone uniformly Tcnows his place' and
is always in it. It is in the latter that prestige groups are most
likely to be uniform and continuous.
Imagine a society in which everyone's prestige is absolutely
set and unambivalent; every man's claims for prestige are bal-
anced by the prestige he receives, and both his expression of
claims and the ways these claims are honored by others are set
forth in understood stereotypes. Moreover, the bases of the claims
coincide with the reasons they are honored: those who claim
239
240 STYLES OF LIFE
prestige on the specific basis of property or birth are honored
because of their property or birth. So the exact volume and types
of deference expected between any two individuals are always
known, expected, and given; and each individual's level and type
of self-esteem are steady features of his inner life.
Now imagine the opposite society, in which prestige is highly
unstable and ambivalent: the individual's claims are not usually
honored by others. The way claims are expressed are not under-
stood or acknowledged by those from whom deference is ex-
pected, and when others do bestow prestige, they do so un-
clearly. One man claims prestige on the basis of his income, but
even if he is given prestige, it is not because of his income but
rather, for example, his education or appearance. All the con-
trolling devices by which the volume and type of deference
might be directed are out of joint or simply do not exist. So the
prestige system is no system, but a maze of misunderstanding, of
sudden frustration and sudden indulgence, and the individual,
as his self-esteem fluctuates, is under strain and full of anxiety.
American society in the middle of the twentieth century does
not fit either of these projections absolutely, but it seems fairly
clear that it is closer to the unstable and ambivalent model. This
is not to say that there is no prestige system in the United States;
gi\'en occupational levels, however caught in status ambivalence,
do enjoy typical levels of prestige. It is to say, however, that the
enjoyment of prestige is often disturbed and uneasy, that the
bases of prestige, the expressions of prestige claims, and the ways
these claims are honored, are now subject to great strain, a strain
which often puts men and women in a virtual status panic,
1. White-Collar Prestige
The prestige position of white-collar employees has been one
of the most arguable points about them as strata, the major point
to be explained by those who would locate them in modem social
structures. Although no one dimension of stratification can be
adequate, the social esteem white-collar employees have success-
fully claimed is one of their important defining characteristics.
In fact, their psychology can often be understood as the psy-
chology of prestige striving. That it is often taken as their signal
THE STATUS PANIC 241
attribute probably reflects the effort, which we accept, to over-
come the exclusively economic view of stratification; it also re-
flects the desire, which we reject, to encompass the entire group
with a single slogan.
White-collar people's claims to prestige are expressed, as their
label implies, by their style of appearance. Their occupations
enable and require them to wear street clothes at work. Although
they may be expected to dress somewhat somberly, still, their
working attire is not a uniform, or distinct from clothing gen-
erally suitable for street wear. The standardization and mass pro-
duction of fashionable clothing have wiped out many distinctions
that were important up to the twentieth century, but they have
not eliminated the distinctions still typical between white-collar
and wage-worker. The wage-worker may wear standardized
street clothes off the job, but the white-collar worker wears them
on the job as well. This difference is revealed by the clothing
budgets of wage-workers and white-collar people, especially of
girls and women. After later adolescence, women working as
clerks, compared with wage-working women of similar income,
spend a good deal more on clothes; and the same is true of men,
although to a lesser extent.
The class position of employed people depends on their
chances in the labor market; their status position depends on
their chances in the commodity market. Claims for prestige are
raised on the basis of consumption; but since consumption is
limited by income, class position and status position intersect.
At this intersection, clothing expenditure is, of course, merely
an index, although a very important one, to the style of appear-
ance and the life-ways displayed by the white-collar strata.
Claims for prestige, however expressed, must be honored by
others, and, in the end, must rest upon more or less widely
acknowledged bases, which distinguish the people of one social
stratum from others. The pnestige of any stratum, of course, is
based upon its mutually recognized relations with other strata.
The 'middle position' of white-collar people between inde-
pendent employers and wage-workers, 'a negative characteristic—
rather than definite technical functions,' Emil Lederer wrote in
1912, 'is the social mark of the salaried employees and establishes
242 STYLES OF LIFE
their social character in their own consciousness and in the esti-
mation of the community.' *
Salaried employees have been associated with entrepreneurs,
and later with higher-ups in the managerial cadre, and they have
borrowed prestige from both. In the latter nineteenth century,
the foreman, the salesclerk, and the office man were widely
viewed, and viewed themselves, as apprentices or assistants to
old middle-class people. Drawing upon their future hopes to join
these ranks, they were able to borrow the prestige of the people
for whom they worked, and with whom they were in close, often
personal, contact. White-collar people intermarried with mem-
bers of the old middle class and enjoyed common social activi-
ties; in many cases the salaried man represented the entrepre-
neur to the public and was recruited from the same social levels—
mainly, the old rural middle class. All this— descent, association,
and expectation— made it possible for earlier salaried employees
to borrow status from the old middle class.
Today, in big city as well as small town, white-collar workers
continue to borrow such prestige. It is true that in larger con-
cerns personal contacts with old middle-class entrepreneurs have
been superseded by impersonal contacts with the lower rungs of
the new managerial cadre. Still, all white-collar people do not
lack personal contact with employers; not all of them are em-
ployed in the big lay-out, which, in many areas, is as yet the
model of the future more than of present reality. The general
images of the white-collar people, in terms of which they are
often able to cash in claims for prestige, are drawn from present
reality. Moreover, even in the big hierarchies, white-collar people
often have more contact— and usually feel that they do— with
higher-ups than do factory workers.
The prestige cleavage between 'the shop' and 'the front office'
often seems to exist quite independently of the low income and
routine character of many front-office jobs and the high pay and
skills of jobs in the shop. For orders and pay checks come from
* According to a recent National Opinion Research rating, on a scale
running from 90.8 for government officials and 80.6 for professionals
and semi-professionals (both free and salaried) to 45.8 for non-farm
laborers, the whole group of 'clerical, sales, and kindred workers' stand
at 68.2, about on a par with the 'craftsmen, foremen, and kindred
workers.'
THE STATUS PANIC 243
the office and are associated with it; and those who are somehow
of it are endowed with some of the prestige that attends its func-
tion in the life of the wage-worker. The tendency of white-collar
people to borrow status from higher elements is so strong that
it has carried over to all social contacts and features of the work-
place.
Salespeople in department stores, as we have already seen, fre-
quently attempt, although often unsuccessfully, to borrow pres-
tige from their contact with customers, and to cash it in among
work colleagues as well as friends off the job. In the big city the
girl who works on 34th Street cannot successfully claim as much
prestige a^ the one who works on Fifth Avenue or 57th Street.
Writes one observer: 'A salesgirl in Bonwit Teller's . . . will act
and feel different from a salesgirl at Macy's. She will be more
gracious, more helpful, more charming . . . but at the same
time she will have an air of dignity and distance about her, an
air of distinction, that implies, "I am more important than you
because my customers come from Park Avenue." '
It is usually possible to know the prestige of salespeople in
department stores in terms of the commodities they handle,
ranked according to the 'expensiveness' of the people who typi-
cally buy them. Prestige may be borrowed directly from the com-
modities themselves, although this is not as likely as borrowing
from the type of customer.
If white-collar relations with supervisors and higher-ups, with
customers or clients, become so impersonal as seriously to limit
borrowing prestige from them, prestige is then often borrowed
from the firm or the company itself. The fetishism of the enter-
prise, and identification with the firm, are often as relevant for
the white-collar hirelings as for the managers. This identification
may be implemented by the fact that the work itself, as a set of
activities, offers little chance for external prestige claims and in-
ternal self-esteem. So the work one does is buried in the name of
the firm. The typist or the salesgirl does not think of herself in
terms of what she does, but as being with Saks' or 'working
at Time.' A $38-a-week clerk in a chrome and mahogany setting
in Radio City will often successfully raise higher claims for pres-
tige than a $50-a-week stenographer in a small, dingy office on
Seventh Avenue. Help-Wanted ads ('Beautifully Furnished Of-
244 STYLES OF LIFE
fice in Rockefeller Center/ 'Large Nation-wide Concern/ 'OflBces
located on 32nd floor of Empire State Building' ) reveal conscious
appeal to the status striving of the office worker. Such positions
are often easier to fill, not because of higher salary and more
rapid promotion, but because of the prestige of the firm's name
or location.
In identifying with a firm, the young executive can sometimes
line up his career expectations with it, and so identify his own
future with that of the firm's. But lower down the ranks, the
identification has more to do with security and prestige than
with expectations of success. In either case, of course, such feel-
ings can be exploited in the interests of business loyalties.
In the impersonal white-collar hierarchies, employees often at-
tempt to personalize their surroundings in order to identify with
them more closely and draw prestige therefrom. In the personnel
literature, there are many illustrations of an often pathetic striv-
ing for a sense of importance— for example, when a girl's chair is
taken from her and she is given one thought more convenient
for her work, her production drops. When questioned, she asks,
'Why are you picking on me?' and explains that she had used the
old chair for five years and it had her name plate on it. When
the name plate is transferred to the new chair, it is explained,
her attitude changes, and her production comes up to normal.
Similar observations have been made in connection with the ar-
rangement of desks in an oflBce, in which, unknown to manage-
ment, the old pattern had been in terms of seniority. Women are
probably more alert to these prestige borrowings than men. The
first consideration of one large group of women seeking employ-
ment had to do with 'the office environment,' the state of the
equipment, the appearance of the place, the 'class of people'
working there. Periodical salary increases and initial salary were
both ranked below such considerations. Of course, such prestige
matters often involve the desire to be available on a market for
more marriageable males, yet the material signs of the status en-
vironment are in themselves crucial to the white-collar sense of
importance.
That white-collar work requires more mental capacity and less
muscular effort than wage work has been a standard, historical
THE STATUS PANIC 245
basis for prestige claims. In the office, as we have seen, white-
collar technology and social rationalization have definitely les-
sened technical differences between white-collar and factory
work. Many white-collar people now operate light machinery at
a pace and under conditions that are quite similar to those of
light industrial operations, even if they do so while wearing street
clothes rather than overalls. Still, the variety of operations and
the degree of autonomous decision are taken as bases of white-
collar prestige. And it is true that in thousands of offices and
salesrooms, the receptionist, the salesgirl, the general secretary,
and even the typist seems to perform a wide variety of different
operations at her own pace and according to her own decisions.
The time required to learn white-collar skills and how they are
learned has been an important basis of their prestige, even
though as white-collar work is rationalized the time needed to
acquire the necessary skills decreases. Some 80 per cent of the
people at "work, it is frequently estimated, now perform work
that can be learned in less than three months. Accompanying
this rationalization of the work process, a stratum of highly
skilled experts has arisen. Over the whole society, this stratum
is popularly, even if erroneously, associated with 'white-collar'
work, while the semi-skilled is associated with wage work. So
those white-collar workers who are in fact quite unskilled and
routinized still borrow from the prestige of the skills.
More crucially, perhaps, than type of skill is the fact that many
white-collar skills are still acquired at school rather than on the
job. The two ways of learning working skills that carry most
prestige have been combined in many white-collar areas, whereas
neither is now prevalent among wage-workers. Apprenticeship,
involving close contact with entrepreneurs or managerial levels,
continued in white-collar occupations after they had ceased to
exist in wage work; then, formal education, in high school and
'business college,' became the typical white-collar way.
The shift from small independent property to dependent occu-
pations greatly increases the weight of formal education in deter-
mining life conditions. For the new middle class, education has
replaced property as the insurance of social position. The saving
and sacrifice of the new middle class to insure a 'good education'
for the child replace the saving and sacrffice of the old middle
246 STYLES OF LIFE
class to insure that the child may inherit 'the good property' with
which to earn his livelihood. The inheritance of occupational
ambition, and of the education that is its condition, replaces the
inheritance of property.
To acquire some white-collar skills requires twenty years of
formal and expensive education; others may be learned in one
day, and are more efficiently performed by those with little edu-
cation. For some white-collar jobs, people above the grammar-
school level are not wanted, for fear boredom would lead to slow-
down by frustration; for others, only the Ph.D. is allowed to go
to work. But the educational center around which the white-
collar worlds revolve is the high school.
In 1890, only 7 out of every 100 boys and girls between 14 and
17 were enrolled in high schools; by 1940, 73 out of every 100
were. During these fifty years, the number of children of this age
increased some 82 per cent, the number of high-school enroll-
ments, 1,888 per cent. The white-collar people, the great deposi-
tory of the High-School Culture implanted in U.S. youth, have
completed an average of 12.4 years of school, compared with the
free enterprisers' 8.4 and the wage- workers' 8.2 years.* On every
occupational level, white-collar men and women are better edu-
cated, except for the single one of independent professionals,
who, of course, lead educationally with 16.4 years of schooling.
Many a clerk in a small ofiice has a less educated, although more
experienced, boss; many a salesclerk in a small store is super-
vised by a higher-up not so well educated as she. Of course, the
higher educational level of the white-collar people in part reflects
their youthfulness; being younger, they have had more oppor-
tunities for education. But they have availed themselves of it;
for in the white-collar pyramids education has 'paid off'; it has
been a source of cash and a means of ascent. Here Tcnowledge,'
although not power, has been a basis for prestige, f
• The breakdown by detailed groups (median years of school com-
pleted, 1940): farmers, 7.6 years; businessmen, 9.9; free professionals,
16.4; managers, 10.8; salaried professionals, 14.9; salespeople, 12.1;
oflBce workers, 12.3; skilled workers, 8.5; semi-skilled, 8.4; unskilled,
8.2; rural workers, 7.3.
f No doubt some prestige accrues to white-collar people because of
their youthfulness, first because if they are young they may, in the
American ethos, still be hopefully seen as having more to win; and sec-
THE STATUS PANIC 247
Even today, white-collar occupations contain the highest gen-
eral average of educated people; but twenty-five years ago this
was much more strongly the case; in large part, white-collar
people monopolized intermediate and higher education. Twenty-
five years ahead it will not necessarily be the case; in fact, all
trends point to the continued narrowing of the educational gap
between white-collar and wage-worker.
Fifty years ago the general labor market was almost entirely
composed of grade-school graduates; today of high-school gradu-
ates; by the early 'fifties 9^ million college-educated youth wdll
be in the labor market. Most of them will reach for the white-
collar job, and many of them will not find routinized white-collar
jobs a challenge, for, as H. K. Tootle has estimated for an office-
management association, 'educated youth is being channeled into
business faster than job satisfactions can be developed for it. . .
As there are not enough stimulating jobs for the hordes of college
graduates we see descending upon us in the years to come hke
swarms of hungry locusts, they will have to take jobs that satisfy,
or perhaps even now do not satisfy, the high-school graduate.'
As the general educational level rises, the level of education
required or advisable for many white-collar jobs falls. In the early
'twenties, personnel men said: 'I think it has become a principle
with the majority of our progressive offices that they will not take
into the office any person or candidate who has not had the
benefit of at least a high-school education.' But soon they began
to say that too much education was not advisable for many white-
collar jobs. In fact, the educated intelligence has become penal-
ized in routinized work, where the search is for those who are
less easily bored and hence more cheerfully efficient. 'When you
employ 2600 clerks,' says one personnel supervisor, 'you don't
want all college people. I much prefer the young fellow who is
fresh from high school, or graduated from normal school, and
who is full of pep and ambition, and wants to get ahead. We
could not use college men in many of our positions.' Education,
in short, comes to be viewed as a sort of frustrating trap.
The rationalization of office and store undermines the special
skills based on experience and education. It makes the employee
ondly, because youth itself often carries prestige, a prestige that is
much advertised by displayed models and expected efficiency.
248 STYLES OF LIFE
easy to replace by shortening the training he needs; it weakens
not only his bargaining power but his prestige. It opens white-
collar positions to people with less education, thus destroying the
educational prestige of white-collar work, for there is no inherent
prestige attached to the nature of any work; it is, Hans Speier
remarks, the esteem the people doing it enjoy that often lends
prestige to the work itself. In so far as white-collar workers base
their claims for external prestige and their own self-esteem upon
educated skills, they open themselves to a precarious psychologi-
cal life.
In the United States, white-collar people have been able to
claim higher prestige than wage-workers because of racial, but
to a greater extent and in a more direct way, national origin.
The number of Negroes in white-collar jobs is negligible, but
especially since World War I, considerable numbers have worked
in unskilled and semi-skilled factory jobs. The new middle class
contains a greater proportion of white people than any other oc-
cupational stratum: in 1940, some 99.5 per cent of the white-
collar, compared with 90 per cent of free enterprisers, 87 per cent
of urban wage-workers, and 74 per cent of rural workers.
Nativity and immigration differences between white-collar and
wage-work are probably more direct bases of white-collar pres-
tige. When the 'race peril' literature was popular, the textbook
myth about the lowly character of newer immigrants was also
widespread. Most of the major American historians of the period
between 1875 and 1925 belligerently declared the superiority of
"Anglo-Saxon' stock, concludes Edward Saveth. Being of old
stock themselves, their 'conception of the immigrant reflected,
in some degree, their feeling that the newcomer somehow con-
stituted a threat to what they hold dear, ideologically and mate-
rially. . .' Mass as well as academic publicity reflected and
spread the fact of prestige distinctions between immigrant and
native.
If the 'American' stature of a group may be judged by the
proportion of its native-born members, white-collar workers have
been the most American of all occupational strata. In 1930, after
mass immigration had been stopped, only 9 per cent of the white
population of the new middle class were foreign-born, compared
THE STATUS PANIC 249
to. 16 per cent of the free enterprisers and 21 per cent of the
wage- workers. But now there is no bulk immigration: soon, vir-
tually all Americans will be American-born of American-borr
parents. Time will not automatically erase the prestige cleavages
based on descent, but, for most white-collar- and wage-workers,
as they become more similar in origin, it probably will. In the
meantime, nativity differences still underlie the prestige claims
of white-collar groups.
Every basis on which the prestige claims of the bulk of the
white-collar employees have historically rested has been declin-
ing in firmness and stability: the rationalization and down-grad-
ing of the work operations themselves and hence the lessening
importance of education and experience in acquiring white-collar
skills; the leveling down of white-collar and the raising of wage-
worker incomes, so that the differences between them are de-
cidedly less than they once were; the increased size of the white-
collar labor market, as more people from lower ranks receive
high-school educations, so that any monopoly of formal training,
adequate to these jobs is no longer possible; the decline in the
proportion of people of immigrant origin and the consequent nar-
rowing of nativity differences between white-collar and wage-
worker; the increased participation of white-collar people, alone:
with wage-workers, in unemployment; and the increased eco-
nomic and public power of wage-workers because of their union
strength, as compared with that of white-collar workers.
All these tendencies for white-collar occupations to sink in
prestige rest upon the numerical enlargement of the white-collar
strata and the increase in prestige which the wage-workers have
enjoyed. If everybody belongs to the fraternity, nobody gets any
prestige from belonging. As the white-collar strata have expanded
they have included more offspring of wage-worker origin; more-
over, in so far as their prestige has rested upon their sharing the
authority of those in charge of the enterprise, that authority has
itself lost much of its prestige, having been successfully chal-
lenged at many points by unionized wage-workers.
Although trends should not be confused with accomplished
facts, it is clear that many trends point to a 'status proletarianiza-
tion' of white-collar strata.
250 STYLES OF LIFE
2. The Smaller City
lo understand the prestige of white-collar people we must
examine the kinds of people among whom they successfully raise
claims for prestige. For different groups do not honor white-collar
claims to the same extent; in fact, their estimates often clash, and
there is much ambivalence about white-collar prestige.
White-collar workers are city people; in the smaller cities, they
live on the right side of the tracks and work 'uptown'; in the
larger cities they often live in suburbs and work 'downtown.'
The city is their milieu and they are shaped by its mass ways.
As the city has expanded, more and more of its inhabitants have
been white-collar people. And it is in cities of differing size that
they must raise their claims for prestige.
In the smaller cities, lower classes sometimes use the term
"white collar' to refer to everyone above themselves. Sometimes
their attitude is that white-collar people are 'pencil pushers' who
'sit around and don't work and figure out ways of keeping wages
cheap'; and sometimes it is that 'the clerks are very essential.
They are the ones who keep the ball rolling for the other guy.
We would be lost if we didn't have the clerks.' The upper classes,
on the other hand, never acknowledge white-collar people as of
the upper levels and sometimes even place them with 'the labor-
ers.' An upper-class man in a city of 60,000, for instance, says:
'Next after retailers, I would put the policemen, firemen, the
average factory worker and the white-collar clerks. . . I've lived
in this town all my life and come to the bank every day but Sun-
day and I can't name five clerks downtown I know.'
This situation of white-collar prestige in the smaller city is in
part due to the fact that white-collar occupations are divided into
higher and lower, in terms of almost every basis on which pres-
tige claims might be made: social origin, occupational history,
income, education. Now, the images held of the white-collar
people by upper-class groups seem to be derived, by and large,
from the lower groups of these occupations, the 'clerk' and the
'salesperson.' When upper-class individuals do focus upon higher-
income salesmen, or professional and managerial employees, they
think of them as part of 'business' rather than as part of 'white
THE STATUS PANIC 251
collar.' Members of lower classes, on the other hand, tend to
blend white collar, both higher and lower, into business and to
make little distinction between them.
The ambiguous prestige of the smaller businessman in these
smaller cities is explained, in part, by the 'power' ascribed to him
by lower groups but denied to him by the upper. In so far as
power is concerned, the ambiguous status position of the white-
collar worker rests less upon complications in his power position
than upon his lack of any power. White-collar employees have
no leaders active as their representatives in civic efforts; they
are not represented as a stratum in the councils; they have no
autonomous organizations through which to strive for political
and civic ends; they are seldom, if ever, in the publicity spot-
light. No articulate leaders appeal directly to them, or draw
strength from their support. In the organized power of the mid-
dle-sized city, there is no autonomous white-collar unit.
The few organizations in which white-collar employees are
sometimes predominant— the Business and Professional Women's
Clubs, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the YWCA— are so
tied in with business groups that they have little or no autonomy.
Socially, the lower white-collar people are usually on 'the Elk
level,' the higher in the No. 2 or 3 social club; in both they are
part of a 'middle-class mingling' pattern. They are 'led,' if at all,
by higher-income salesmen and other 'contact people,' who are
themselves identified with 'business,' and whose activities thus
lend prestige to businessmen rather than to white-collar people.
Even in the smaller cities, then, there is no homogeneous social
arena in which white-collar prestige is uniformly honored; in the
big city this fact is the key to the character of white-collar
prestige.
3. The Metropolis
The rise of the big city has modified the prestige structure of
modern society: it has greatly enlarged the social areas with ref-
erence to which prestige is claimed; it has split the individual
from easily identifiable groups in which he might claim prestige
and in which his claims might be acknowledged; it has given rise
to many diverse, segregated areas in each of which the individual
252 STYLES OF LIFE
may advance claims; and it has made these areas impersonal.
The prestige market of the big city is often a market of strangers,
a milieu where contacts having relevance to prestige are often
transitory and fleeting.
The neighbors of the small-town man know much of what is
to be known about him. The metropolitan man is a temporary
focus of heterogeneous circles of casual acquaintances, rather
than a fixed center of a few well-known groups. So personal
snoopiness is replaced by formal indifference; one has contacts,
rather than relations, and these contacts are shorter-hved and
more superficial. 'The more people one knows the easier it be-
comes to replace them.'
The metropolitan man's biography is often unknown, his past
apparent only to very limited groups, so the basis of his status
is often hidden and ambivalent, revealed only in the fast-chang-
ing appearances of his mobile, anonymous existence. Intimacy
and the personal touch, no longer intrinsic to his way of life,
are often contrived devices of impersonal manipulation. Rather
than cohesion there is uniformity, rather than descent or tradi-
tion, interests. Physically close, but socially distant, human rela-
tions become at once intense and impersonal— and in every detail,
pecuniary.
Apart from educational opportimities, the status of most mid-
dle- and working-class people becomes individualized, one gen-
eration cut off from the other. Among the propertyless, status
must be won anew by each generation. The small businessman's
sons or the farmer's might look forward to the inheritance of a
more or less secure property as a basis for their status; the floor-
walker's sons or the assistant manager's cannot expect to inherit
such family position.
The more transparent lives of people in smaller cities permit
status bases, such as social origin, to be more readily transferred
to various occupational levels. The nature of the opaque contacts
characteristic of big city life make this difficult: members of one
occupational level may see or even contact members of others,
but usually in a stereotyped rather than in a personal manner.
They meet on impersonal terms and then retire into their socially
insulated personal lives. In smaller cities and smaller enterprises.
THE STATUS PANIC 253
the status lines between white-collar and wage-worker are, per-
haps, drawn most clearly. In metropolitan areas white-collar
people seldom contact wage-workers; the physical lay-out of the
city, the segregation of routes of travel for different occupations
often restrict people to separate circles of acquaintances.
The mass media, primarily movies and radio, have further en-
larged the whole prestige area and the means of status expres-
sion. In the media the life styles of the top levels are displayed
to the bottom in a way and to an extent not previously the case.
Some communication system is needed to cover any prestige
area, and in modern times, with the enlargement of prestige
areas, TDcing seen' in the formal media is taken as a basis of status
claims as well as a cashing of them. When national prestige was
focused in local society, local newspapers used to be the princi-
pal media involved in the prestige of local society matrons.
But since the 1920's, radio and especially motion pictures and
TV have supplemented newspapers and have created a national
status market in which the movie star, a status type who sud-
denly acquires liquid assets and a lavish style of life has re-
placed the local society matron. The deciders and originators
in matters of the highest fashion and style of life have definitely
passed from the old families of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
and Newport to the stars of Hollywood and Radio City.
'In Newport, and on Fifth Avenue,' Lloyd Morris has observed,
'wealth had been a weapon indispensable to those who fought to
win social power. In Hollywood, social prestige was an instru-
ment essential to those determined to win wealth.' The society
reporters of all the eastern cities combined cannot compete with
the several hundred journalists who cover Hollywood. Two dozen
magazines are devoted to the film center; Louella Parsons reaches
thirty million readers. Eighteen thousand movie houses are vis-
ited by ninety million people each week. The heterogeneous
public appears avid for intimate details of the Hollywood elite.
And the movies, which made them an elite, are set up to supply
new images of them continuously. Not the society matron, but
the movie star becomes the model for the office girl.
The rich of previous eras could not so readily be known by the
public, the way they lived being known only by hearsay and
254 STYLES OF LIFE
glimpses through curtained windows. But by the 1920's in
America a democracy of status vision had come about; the area
of prestige was truly national; now the bottom could see the top
—at least that version of it that was put on display. It did not
matter if this top was sometimes contrived and often a cloak.
It did not matter if the real top was even more secluded and
unseen than before. For those on the bottom, the top presented
was real and it was dazzling.
The enlargement and animation, the anonymity and the transi-
toriness, the faster turnover and the increased visibility of the
top, filling the individual's vision with a series of big close-ups—
these changes have been paralleled by less noticed but equally
intense changes in the prestige dynamics of the middle and
lower strata.
4. The Status Panic
The historic bases of white-collar prestige are now infirm; the
areas in which white-collar people must seek to have their claims
honored are agitated. Both sides of the situation in which they
are caught impel them to emphasize prestige and often to engage
in a great striving for its symbols. In this, three mechanisms seem
to be operating:
I. In the white-collar hierarchies, as we have seen, individuals
are often segregated by minute gradations of rank, and, at the
same time, subject to a fragmentation of skill. This bureaucratiza-
tion often breaks up the occupational bases of their prestige.
Since the individual may seize upon minute distinctions as bases
for status, these distinctions operate against any status solidarity
among the mass of employees, often lead to status estrangement
from work associates, and to increased status competition. The
employees are thus further alienated from work, for, in striving
for the next rank, they come to anticipate identification with it,
so that now they are not really in their places. Like money, status
that is exterior to one's present work does not lead to intrinsic
work gratification. Only if present work leads to the anticipated
goal by a progression of skills, and is thus given meaning, will
status aspirations not alienate the worker. Status ascent within
THE STATUS PANIC 255
the hierarchy is a kind of illusionary success, for it does not
necessarily increase income or the chance to learn superior skills.
Above all, the hierarchy is often accompanied by a delirium for
status merely because of its authoritarian shape: as Karl Mann-
heim has observed, people who are dependent for everything,
including images of themselves, upon place in an authoritarian
hierarchy, will all the more frantically cling to claims of status.
The sharp split of residence from work place, characteristic of
urban life since the Industrial Revolution, is most clearly mani-
fested in the big city suburb, where work associates are formally
segregated from neighbors. This means that the subordinate may
compete in two status worlds, that of work place in the big city
and that of residence in the suburb.
At the work place, it is difficult, even in large enterprises, to
inflate real occupational status, although great status tensions are
likely to be lodged there. But actual job position is not so well
known to those whom one meets away from work. It may be
that to the extent that status aspirations and claims are frustrated
at work, there is a more intense striving to realize them off^ the
job. If the status struggle within the job hierarchy is lost, the
status struggle outside the job area shifts its ground: one hides
his exact job, claims prestige from his title or firm, or makes up
job, title, or firm. Among anonymous metropolitan throngs, one
can make claims about one's job, as well as about other bases of
prestige, which minimize or override actual occupational status.
The place of residence, which is a signal of income and style
of life, limits this inflation of status; for neighbors, like job associ-
ates, will not readily cash in higher claims. But there are other
areas. Anonymous and the just-known strangers, who cannot so
readily 'place' one, may cash in one's claims. Among them, the
first, often the only, impression one makes may permit a brief
success in status claiming, sometimes as a sort of mutual deal.
n. 'Under modem conditions,' Thorstein Veblen wrote, 'the
struggle for existence has, in a very appreciable degree, been
transformed into a struggle to keep up appearance.' Personal
worth and integrity may count for something but 'one's reputa-
tion for excellence in this direction does not penetrate far enough
into the ver)' wide environment to which a person is exposed in
256 STYLES OF LIFE
modem society to satisfy even a very modest craving for respect-
ability. To sustain one's dignity— and to sustain one's self -respect-
under the eyes of people who are not socially one's immediate
neighbors, it is necessary to display the token of economic worth,
which practically coincides . . . with economic success.'
The leisure of many middle-class people i§ entirely taken up
by attempts to gratify their status claims. Just as work is» made
empty by the processes of alienation, so leisure is made hollow
by status snobbery and the demands of emulative consumption.
It takes money to do something nice in one's off time— when
there is an absence of inner resources and a status avoidance of
cheaper or even costless forms of entertainment. With the urban
breakdown of compact social groups in smaller communities, the
prestige relations become impersonal; in the metropolis, when
the job becomes an insecure basis or even a negative one, then
the sphere of leisure and appearance become more crucial for
status.
'One does not "make much of a showing" in the eyes of the
large majority of the people whom one meets with,' Veblen con-
tinued, 'except by unremitting demonstration of ability to pay.
That is practically the only means which the average of us have
of impressing our respectability on the many to whom we are
personally unknown, but whose transient good opinion we would
so gladly enjoy. So it comes about that the appearance of success
is very much to be desired, and is even in many cases preferred
to the substance . . . the modern industrial organization of soci-
ety has practically narrowed the scope of emulation to this one
line; and at the same time it has made the means of sustenance
and comfort so much easier to obtain as very materially to widen
the margin of human exertion that can be devoted to purposes
of emulation.'
Of an eighteenth-century nobility, Dickens could say that 'dress
was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all
things in their places,' but in a mass society without a stable
system of status, with quick, cheap imitations, dress is often no
talisman. The clerk who sees beautifully gowned women in the
movies and on the streets may wear imitations if she works hard
and, skipping the spiced ham sandwich, has only cokes for lunch.
Her imitations are easily found out, but that is not to say they
THE STATUS PANIC 257
do not please her. Self-respectability is not the same as self-re-
spect. On the personality markets, emotions become ceremonial
gestures by which status is claimed, alienated from the inner feel-
ings they supposedly express. Self-estrangement is thus inherent
in the fetishism of appearance.
in. The prestige enjoyed by individual white-collar workers
is not continuously fixed by large forces, for their prestige is not
continuously the same. Many are involved in status cycles, which,
as Tom Harrison has observed, often occur in a sort of rhythmic
pattern. These cycles allow people in a lower class and status
level to act like persons on higher levels and temporarily to get
away with it.
During weekdays the white-collar employee receives a given
volume of deference from a given set of people, work associates,
friends, family members, and from the transient glimpses of
strangers on transport lines and street. But over the week end,
or perhaps a week end once a month, one can by plan raise
oneself to higher status: clothing changes, the restaurant or type
of food eaten changes, the best theater seats are had. One
cannot well change one's residence over the week end, but in
the big city one can get away from it, and in the small town one
can travel to the near-by city. Expressed claims of status may
be raised, and more importantly those among whom one claims
status may vary— even if these others are other strangers in dif-
ferent locales. And every white-collar girl knows the value of a
strict segregation of regular boy friends, who might drop around
the apartment any night of the week, from the special date for
whom she always dresses and with whom she always goes out.
There may also be a more dramatic yearly status cycle, involv-
ing the vacation as its high point. Urban masses look forward to
vacations not 'just for the change,' and not only for a 'rest from
work'— the meaning behind such phrases is often a lift in success-
ful status claims. For on vacation, one can buy the feeling, even
if only for a short time, of higher status. The expensive resort,
where one is not known, the swank hotel, even if for three days
and nights, the cruise first class— for a week. Much vacation ap-
paratus is geared to these status cycles; the staffs as well as cli-
entele play-act the whole set-up as if mutually consenting to be
258 STYLES OF LIFE
part of the successful illusion. For such experiences once a year,
sacrifices are often made in long stretches of gray weekdays.
The bright two weeks feed the dream life of the dull pull.
Psychologically, status cycles provide, for brief periods of
time, a holiday image of self, which contrasts sharply with the
self-image of everyday reality. They provide a temporary satis-
faction of the person's prized image of self, thus permitting him
to cling to a false consciousness of his status position. They are
among the forces that rationalize and make life more bearable,
compensate for economic inferiority by allowing temporary satis-
faction of the ambition to consume.
Socially, status cycles blur the realities of class and prestige
differences by offering respite from them. Talk of the 'status flu-
idity of American life' often refers merely to status cycles, even
though socially these cycles of higher display and holiday grati-
fication do not modify the long-run reality of more fixed positions.
Status cycles further the tendency of economic ambition to
be fragmented, made trivial, and temporarily satisfied in terms
of commodities and their ostentatious display. The whole ebb
and flow of saving and spending, of working and consuming,
may be geared to them. Like those natives who starve untfl
whales are tossed upon the beach, and then gorge, white-collar
workers may suffer long privation of status until the month-end
or year-end, and then splurge in an orgy of prestige gratification
and consumption.
Between the high points of the status cycle and the machinery
of amusement there is a coincidence: the holiday image of self
derives from both. In the movie the white-collar girl vicariously
plays the roles she thinks she would like to play, cashes in her
claims for esteem. At the peak of her status cycle she crudely
play-acts the higher levels, as she believes she would like to
always. The machinery of amusement and the status cycle sus-
tain the illusionary world in which many white-collar people now
live.
12
Success
Success' in America has been a widespread fact, an engaging
image, a driving motive, and a way of life. In the middle of the
twentieth century, it has become less widespread as fact, more
confused as image, often dubious as motive, and soured as a way
of life.
No other domestic change is so pivotal for the tang and feel
of society in America, or more ambiguous for the inner life of the
individual, and none has been so intricately involved in the
transformation of the old into the new middle classes. Other
strata have certainly been affected, but the middle classes have
been most grievously modified by the newer meanings of success
and the increased chances of failure.
To understand the meaning of this shift we must understand
the major patterns of American success and the ideologies char-
acteristic of each of them; the changing role of the educational
system as an occupational elevator; and the long-run forces, as
well as the effects of the slump-war-boom cycle, which lift or
lower the rate of upward movement.
1. Patterns and Ideologies
During booms, success for the American individual has
seemed as sure as social progress, and just as surely to rest on
and to exemplify personal virtue. The American gospel of suc-
cess has been a kind of individual specification of the middle-
class gospel of progress: in the big, self-made men, rising after
259
260 STYLES OF LIFE
the Civil War, progress seemed to pervade the whole society.
The ambitious springs of success were unambiguous, its money
target clear and visible, and its paths, if rugged, well marked out;
there was a surefootedness about the way middle-class men went
about their lives.
The idea of the successful individual was linked with the lib-
eral ideology of expanding capitalism. Liberal sociology, assum-
ing a gradation of ranks in which everyone is rewarded accord-
ing to his ability and efiFort, has paid less attention to the fate
of groups or classes than to the solitary individual, naked of all
save personal merit. The entrepreneur, making his way across
the open market, most clearly displayed success in these terms.
The way up, according to the classic style of liberalism, was
to establish a small enterprise and to expand it by competition
with other enterprises. The worker became a foreman and then
an industrialist; the clerk became a bookkeeper or a drummer
and then a merchant on his own. The farmer's son took up land
in his own right and, long before his old age, came into profits
and independence. The competition and effort involved in these
ways up formed the cradle of a self-reliant personality and the
guarantee of economic and political democracy itself.
Success was bound up with the expansible possession rather
than the forward-looking job. It was with reference to property
that young men were spoken of as having great or small 'expec-
tations.' Yet in this image success rested less on inheritances than
on new beginnings from the bottom; for, it was thought, 'business
long ago ceased to be a matter of inheritance, and became the
property of brains and persistence.'
According to the old entrepreneur's ideology, success is always
linked with the sober personal virtues of will power and thrift,
habits of order, neatness, and the constitutional inability to say
Yes to the easy road.* These virtues are at once a condition
and a sign of success. Without them, success is not possible; with
them, all is possible; and, as is clear from the legends of their
• The statement of success ideologies in this section is based on
thematic analyses of some twenty books, selected at random from
files of the New York Public Library, ranging from 1856— Freeman
Hunt's Worth and Wealth (New York, Stringer & Howard) -to 1947-
Loire Brophy's There's Plenty of Room at the Top (New York, Simon
& Schuster).
SUCCESS 261
lives, all successful men have practiced these virtues with great,
driving will, for 'the temple of Fortune is accessible only by a
steep, rugged and difficult path, up which you must drag your-
self.'
The man bent on success will be upright, exactly punctual, and
high-minded; he will soberly refrain from liquor, tobacco, gam-
bling, and loose women. 'Laughter, when it is too hearty, weak-
ens the power of mind; avoid it.' He will never be in a hurry,
will always carefully finish up 'each separate undertaking,' and
so 'keep everything under control.' He will know 'that Method
makes Time,' and will 'promptly improve small opportunities' by
diligent attention to detail. He will gain an ease and confidence
of endeavor, for self-reliance in all things will insure a moral pres-
ence of mind. Also, 'a man's self-respect, and the respect of his
wife and children for him and themselves, will increase continu-
ally as his savings augment.'
To honesty, he will add 'a great degree of caution and pru-
dence'; then honesty, besides being rewarded in the hereafter,
will here and now, be 'the surest way to worldly thrift and pros-
perity.' He will come to understand that 'religion and business
. . . are both right and may essentially serve each other'; that
'religion is a mighty ally of economy. . . Vices cost more than
Virtues. . , Many a young smoker burns up in advance a fifty-
thousand-dollar business'; and more broadly, that religion forti-
fies the 'integrity which is a man's best "reserve stock." '
This inspirational ideology does not often concern itself with
the impersonal structure of opportunity, the limits the economy
sets to the practice of personal virtues; and when it does, personal
virtues still win through: 'The men who are made by circum-
stances are unmade by trifling misfortunes; while they who con-
quer circumstances snap their fingers at luck.' Yet in relating the
detailed means of success, this literature also reveals a good deal
about its social conditions. It seems to have been directed to rural
and small-town boys. If city boys have better education, country
boys have greater 'physical and moral pre-eminence.' In provid-
ing instruction in 'polish,' it indicates in detail how the rural
'bumpkin' must conduct himself in country town and larger city
to avoid being laughed at by city slickers. The aspiring boy is
cautioned never to be 'boisterous' nor have 'free and easy man-
262 STYLES OF LIFE
ners. . . The manners of a gentleman are a sure passport to suc-
cess.' The city, in this literature, is imagined as a goal, but more
importantly, there is a Jeffersonian warning about the evils of
the city and tlie practical admonition that 'Businessmen . . .
are not accidental outcroppings from the great army of smooth-
haired nice young clerks who would rather starve in the city
than be independent in the country.'
Occupationally, the legendary road runs from clerk and then
bookkeeper in the country retail store, then to drummer or trav-
eling salesman, and finally, to business for oneself, usually as a
merchant. 'He who seeks for the merchant of the future will
find him in the clerk of today,' but the intermediate step is very
important and much desired. To the clerk, the drummer is a
source of advice about promising locations and opportunities for
new stores; the drummer can inspect opportunities for himself
and learn about a wide variety of commodity 'lines.' He also
learns to judge others quickly and shrewdly 'so that in making
a statement he could follow in his hearer's mind its efiFects, and
be prepared to stop or to go on at the right moment.' In fact:
'AH that goes towards making a man a good merchant is needed
on the road by a traveling salesman.'
The legendary fork in the road is often 'a business career'
versus farm life or life in a factory. But whatever its occupational
content, it is identified with a moral choice: 'Keeping on the
right side' versus 'being lost.' He who fails, who remains a clerk,
is 'lost,' 'destroyed,' 'ruined.' That end can be met by going either
too slow or too fast, and the 'easy success' of a few prominent
men should not 'dazzle other men to destruction.'
The entrepreneurial pattern of success and its inspirational
ideology rested upon an economy of many small proprietorships.
Under a centralized enterprise system, the pattern of success be-
comes a pattern of the climb within and between prearranged
hierarchies. Whatever the level of opportunity may be, the way
up does not now typically include the acquisition of independent
property. Only those who already have property can now achieve
success based upon it.
The shift from a liberal capitalism of small properties to a cor-
porate system of monopoly capitalism is the basis for the shift
SUCCESS 263
in the path and in the content of success. In the older pattern,
the white-collar job was merely one step on the grand road
to independent entrepreneurship; in the new pattern, the white-
collar way involves promotions within a bureaucratic hierarchy.
When only one-fifth of the population are free enterprisers (and
not that many securely so), independent entiepreneurship can-
not very well be the major end of individual economic life. The
inspirational literature of entrepreneurial success has been an
assurance for the individual and an apology for the system. Now
it is more apologetic, less assuring.
For some three-fourths of the urban middle class, the salaried
employees, the occupational climb replaces heroic tactics in the
open competitive market. Although salaried employees may com-
pete with one another, their field of competition is so hedged in
by bureaucratic regulation that their competition is likely to be
seen as grubbing and backbiting. The main chance now becomes
a series of small calculations, stretched over the working lifetime
of the individual: a bureaucracy is no testing field for heroes.
The success literature has shifted with the success pattern. It
is still focused upon personal virtues, but they are not the sober
virtues once imputed to successful entrepreneurs. Now the stress
is on agility rather than ability, on 'getting along' in a context of
associates, superiors, and rules, rather than 'getting ahead' across
an open market; on who you know rather than what you know;
on techniques of self-display and the generalized knack of han-
dling people, rather than on moral integrity, substantive accom-
plishments, and solidity of person; on loyalty to, or even identity
with, one's own firm, rather than entrepreneurial virtuosity. The
best bet is the style of the efiicient executive, rather than the
drive of the entrepreneur.
'Circumstances, personality, temperament, accident,' as well as
hard work and patience, now appear as key factors governing
success or failure. One should strive for 'experience and responsi-
bility within one's chosen field,' with 'little or no thought of
money.' Special skills and 'executive ability,' preferably native,
are the ways up from routine work. But the most important single
factor is 'personality,' which '. . . commands attention ... by
charm . . . force of character, or . . . demeanor. . . Accom-
264 STYLES OF LIFE
plishment without . . . personality is unfortunate. . . Personal-
ity .. . without industry is . . . undesirable.'
To be courteous 'will help you to get ahead . . . you will
have much more fun . . . will be much less fatigued at night
. . . will be more popular, have more friends.' So, 'Train your-
self to smile. . . Express physical and mental alertness. . . Radi-
ate self-confidence. . . Smile often and sincerely.' 'Everything
you say, everything you do, creates impressions upon other peo-
ple . . . from the cradle to the grave, you've got to get along
with other people. Use sound sales principles and you'll do better
in "selling" your merchandise, your ideas, and yourself.'
The prime meaning of opportunity in a society of employees is
to serve the big firm beyond fhe line of a job's duty and hence to
bring oneself to the attention of the higher-ups who control up-
ward movement. This entails dependability and enthusiasm in
handling the little job in a big way. 'Character . . . includes
. . . innate loyalty in little things and enthusiastic interest in the
job at hand. . . In a word, thoroughly dependable and generally
with an optimistic, helpful attitude.'
'Getting ahead' becomes 'a continual selling job. . . Whether
you are seeking a new position or are aiming at the job just
ahead. In either case you must sell yourself and keep on sell-
ing. . . You have a product and that product is yourself.' The
skillful personal maneuver and the pohtic approach in inter-or-
ganizational contacts, the planful impressing of the business su-
perior become a kind of Machiavellism for the little man, a turn-
ing of oneself into an instrument by which to use others for the
end of success. 'Become genuinely interested in other people. . .
Smile. . . Be a good listener. . . Talk in terms of the other man's
interest. . . Make the other person feel important— and do it sin-
cerely. . . I am talking,' says Dale Carnegie, 'about a new way
of life.'
The heraldry of American success has been the greenback;
even when inspirational writers are most inspirational, the big
money is always there. Both entrepreneurial and white-collar
patterns involve the remaking of personality for pecuniary ends,
but in the entrepreneurial pattern money-success involved the
acquisition of virtues good in themselves: the money is always
SUCCESS 265
to be used for good works, for virtue and good works justify
riches. In the white-collar pattern, there is no such moral sancti-
fying of the means of success; one is merely prodded to become
an instrument of success, to acquire tactics not virtues; money
success is assumed to be an obviously good thing for which no
sacrifice is too great.
The entrepreneurial and white-collar ways of success, although
emerging in historical sequence, are not clear-cut phases through
which American aspiration and endeavor have passed. They now
co-exist, and each has varying relevance in different economic
areas and phases of the economic cycle. Each has also come up
against its own kinds of difficulty, which limit its use as a prod
to striving. In a society of employees in large-scale enterprises,
only a limited number can attempt to follow the entrepreneurial
pattern; in a society that has turned itself into a great salesroom,
the salesman's ways of success are likely to be severely competi-
tive, and, at the same time, rationalized out of existence; in a
society in which the educational level of the lower ranks is con-
stantly rising and jobs are continually rationalized, the white-
collar route to the top is likely to come up against competition it
never knew in more educationally restricted situations.
2. The Educational Elevator
The American belief in the value of universal education has
been a salient feature of democratic ideology; in fact, since the
Jacksonian era, education for all has often been virtually identi-
fied with the operation of a truly democratic society. Moreover,
the hope for more education has slowly been realized. Eighty
years ago a little over half, but today over four-fifths of the chil-
dren of appropriate age are enrolled in public elementary and
secondary schools.
This massive rise in enrollment has strengthened the feeling of
status equality, especially in those smaller cities where all the
children, regardless of social or occupational rank, are likely to
attend the same high school. It has aided immensely in Ameri-
canizing the immigrant. And it has spread and generally strength-
ened old middle-class ideologies, for teachers represent and re-
inforce middle-class attitudes and values, manners and skills.
266 STYLES OF LIFE
Yet, in spite of this reinforcing of old middle-class mores, mass
education has also been one of the major social mechanisms of
the rise of the new middle-class occupations, for these occupa-
tions require those skills that have been provided by the educa-
tional system.
In performing these functions, especially the last, American
education has shifted toward a more explicit vocational emphasis,
functioning as a link in occupational mobility between genera-
tions. High schools, as well as colleges and universities, have been
reshaped for the personnel ileeds of business and government.
In their desire for serviceable practicality, the schools have
adapted themselves to changing demands, and the public has
seemed glad to have its children trained for the available jobs.
The most fundamental question to ask of any educational sys-
tem is what kind of a product do its administrators expect to
turn out? And for what kind of society? In the nineteenth cen-
tury, the answer was 'the good citizen' in a 'democratic republic'
In the middle of the twentieth century, it is 'the successful man'
in a 'society of specialists with secure jobs.'
In the world of small entrepreneurs, little or no educational
preparation was needed for success, much less to get along: one
was stubborn, or courageous, had common sense and worked
hard. Education may have been viewed as a main road to social
equality and political freedom, and as a help in meeting oppor-
tunity so that ability and talent might be appropriately rewarded.
But education was not the big avenue of economic advancement
for the masses of the populace.
In the new society, the meaning of education has shifted from
status and political spheres to economic and occupational areas.
In the white-collar life and its patterns of success, the educational
segment of the individual's career becomes a key to his entire
occupational fate.
Formal requirements for entry into different jobs and expec-
tations of ascent tend to become fixed by educational levels. On
the higher levels, college is the cradle of the professions and
semi-professions, as well as a necessary status-mark for higher
positions. As the virtues and talents of the entrepreneur are re-
placed by the skills and prestige of the educated expert, formal
SUCCESS 267
education becomes central to social and economic success. Sons
who are better educated than their fathers are more likely to
occupy higher occupational positions: in one sample of urban
males, studied by Richard Centers, some 46 per cent of the sons
who were better educated than their fathers reached higher
positions, whereas only 16 per cent of those whose education
was poorer did. The educational link was specifically important
in the U.S. Army during World War II: 64 per cent of the officers,
but only 11 per cent of the enlisted men, had been to college.
The aim of college men today, especially in elite colleges, is
a forward-looking job in a large corporation. Such a job in-
volves training not only in vocational skills, but also in social
mannerisms. Harold Taylor, president of Sarah Lawrence, writes:
'The ideal graduate in the present employment market of indus-
trial executives is a fraternity man with a declared disinterest in
political or social affairs, gentile, white, a member of the football
team, a student with a record of A in each course, a man popular
with everyone and well known on the campus, with many mem-
berships in social clubs— a man who can be imagined in twenty
years as a subject for a Calvert advertisement. The large success-
ful universities have confirmed this stereotype by the plans they
make for the campus social life of the students and by the value
system implicit in its organization. . . Even the liberal arts col-
leges seem bent upon becoming training schools for conservative
industrial executives.'
Although the middle-class monopoly on high-school education
has been broken, equality of educational opportunity has not
been reached; many young people are unable to complete their
secondary school education because of economic restrictions.
' 'Generally speaking,' Walter Kotschnig concludes, 'the children
of large families in the lowest income brackets have little chance
of graduating from high school. They have to leave school early
to help their families. Most of them will never be anything but
poorly paid unskilled workers for the simple reason that . . .
education has become the main avenue to economic and social
success. The situation on the college level is even worse. . .' The
most careful study available reveals that in many cases the
268 STYLES OF LIFE
father's income rather than the boy's brains determines who shall
be college trained.
The parent's class position is also reflected in the type of cur-
riculum taken. Students of law, medicine, or liberal arts gener-
ally come from families having twice the yearly income of stu-
dents in nursing, teaching, or commercial work. 'Of the 580 boys
and girls in a thousand who reach the third year of high school,'
Lloyd Warner and his associates write, 'about half are taking a
course which leads to college. One hundred and fifty enter col-
lege, and 70 graduate. These are average figures for the country
as a whole ... an average of some two hundred out of every
thousand young people fail to achieve the goal toward which
they started in high school.'
The major occupational shift in college education has been
from old middle-class parents to new middle-class children; the
major shift via high-school education has been from skilled-
worker parents to new middle-class children. Colleges and uni-
versities have been social elevators carrying the children of small
businessmen and farmers to the lower order of the professions.
At the University of Chicago, for example, between 1893 and
1931, about 4 out of 10 of the fathers of graduates (bachelor
degrees) were in business, commercial, or proprietary occupa-
tions. Only about one-fourth of these fathers were in professional
service, but 62 per cent of the sons and 73 per cent of the
daughters entered such service.
Mobility between generations probably increases from old to
new middle classes during depressions, as, especially in the
upper-middle brackets, parents seek to secure their children from
the effects of the market. Rather than carry on his father's busi-
ness, many a boy has been trained, at his parents' sacrifice, to
help man some unit of the big-business system that has destroyed
his father's business.
As the old middle classes have come to be distressed and inse-
cure about their small-propertied existence, they have become un-
easy about their ability to get their children into positions equal
to or better than their own. At the same time, wage-workers have
aspired to have their children attain higher levels. Both classes
have emphatically demanded 'educational opportunity' and both
have sacrificed in order to give children better ( more ) education.
SUCCESS 269
Thirty-five years ago John Corbin cried in the name of the
educated white-collar people that education was as much a con-
tribution to the nation's wealth as property, that education was
the white-collar employee's 'capital,' the major basis of his
claim to prestige, and the means by which he should close up his
ranks. Yet, as a type of 'capital,' education carries a limitation
that farms and businesses do not: its exercise is dependent upon
those who control and manage jobs. Today, according to a For-
tune survey, the idea of going into business for oneself 'is so
seldom expressed among college graduates as to seem an anach-
ronism.'
On the one hand, there is a demand for 'equal educational
opportunities' for aU, which once unambiguously meant better
and more secure positions for all. On the other hand, there are
now strong tendencies, which in all probability will continue,
for the educational requirements of many white-collar positions
to decline, and, moreover, for the competition for even these posi-
tions to increase. As a result, the belief in universal education
as a sacrosanct fetish has come to be questioned. This question-
ing, which began about the time of World War I, became more
widespread during the 'thirties and came to sharp focus after
World War II, represents, in Perry Miller's phrase, the 'disloca-
tion in a basic tradition.'
Democratic ideologists now point out that almost 80 per cent
of fifth-grade students, who are mentally capable of college edu-
cation, never reach college, so millions of citizens, according to
E. J. McGrath, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 'go through life
functioning below the level of their potential.' This is undoubt-
edly true, but statisticians, occupational forecasters, and an in-
creasing number of educational officials raise the question
whether or not the occupational structure can possibly provide
the jobs that are expected by college graduates.
During the last half century, college graduates, increasing four
times as much as the general population, were involved in the
expansion of higher white-collar occupations. So education paid
off: ten years ago, college graduates earned one-third more than
the U.S. average. Today, however, college graduates earn only
one-tenth more than the U.S. average, and, according to an in-
formed prediction by Seymour E. Harris, in twenty years 'it
270 STYLES OF LIFE
won't pay to be educated.' By then, instead of 3 million living
college graduates as in 1930, there will be between 10 and 14
million. In order to meet their expectations, the professions would
have to absorb between 8 and 11 million of them, yet between
1910 and 1940 professions expanded less than 2 million. There
are warning cries among educational ideologists, recalling the
contributions made by 'disappointed intellectuals to the rise of
fascism in Europe,' and there are maneuvers and proclamations
among school officials which reflect shifts in the role of education
in the American success story.
Chancellor William J. Wallin of the New York State Board of
Regents has decried higher education for all, declaring 'that the
country might produce "surplus graduates" who, embittered with
their frustration, would "turn upon society and the government,
more effective and better armed in their destructive wrath by the
education we have given them." ' 'Equality of opportunity,' Har-
vard President Conant has recently said, 'is one of the cardinal
principles of this country. . . Yet at the same time, no young
man or woman should be encouraged or enticed into taking the
kinds of advanced educational training which are going to lead
to a frustrated economic life.' 'For a large majority of young
Americans, a four-year college education was not only "needlessly
expensive," but "socially undesirable." '
One of the most popular solutions now being proposed is the
establishment of several educational ladders, each reaching to
different levels of the occupational hierarchy. Such ideas are now
rather widely, although informally, being put into practice in
U.S. high schools. The principal of one high school says: 'This
educational system is a terrific waste of money and time to the
city, since so few people can by any chance become members of
the white-coUar class and so many must follow some vocational
line. . . It is surprising how many people in 8C want the prestige
of a white-collar job. So I point out how poor the pay is and
endeavor to point out how hard it is to fit oneself for such a job
and to make a success of it; the majority of them are unfitted
for any such work. . . I am giving all the groups A, B, and C a
talking to, explaining the disadvantages of the white-collar job
to all of them.' 'There is clear evidence,' comments sociologist
Lloyd Warner, who gathered these quotations, 'that our educa-
SUCCESS 271
tional system is now permitting too many to use high school
and college for the purpose of attaining unavailable professional
and managerial positions, with resultant failure and frustration
and loss of social solidarity.'
Education will work as a means of success only so long as the
occupational needs of a society continue to demand education.
The recognition that they might not has led to the idea, in
Kotchnig's words, of giving 'the masses of young people a gen-
eral and special education in keeping with their abilities, while
preparing leaders for the "several elites," thus breaking down
the one-sided emphasis on the intellectual careers.' Confronted
with such ideas, 'Progressive' educational theorists add to them
the assumption that tests, measurements, placement services, and
vocational guidance can at early ages select those who should go
on, via education, to higher positions and those who should
terminate their education, and hence their occupational chances,
at lower levels.
We have thus come a long way from the simple faith in 'equal
educational opportunity' as part of the American pattern of
success. First, with education a highly specialized channel for
elites with high class chances, the major avenues of advance-
ment do not involve education: independent men, who are 'mak-
ing themselves,' compete on the open market and find tiieir own
levels.
Second, with the democratization of education as political de-
mand and economic need, the occupational structures require
literacy and some skills, and bring about a period of success via
education. The single ladder is not questioned, the ideology of
equal opportunity means that all top positions are competed for
by all those with the ability to climb the educational ladder.
Third, almost all occupational mobility requires education, but
as supply exceeds demand, education is stratified bureaucrati-
cally, by sorting out the young through tests and measurements.
There are increased tendencies to manage the education-occupa-
tion structure and steer it; and magical notions of the environ-
ment are given up. As demand for educated people falls behind
supply, as educated occupations are divided and rationalized, as
eniollments continue to rise, the income and prestige differ-
ences between the more-educated and the less-educated masses
272 STYLES OF LIFE
decrease. Among those who are not allowed to use the educated
skills they have acquired, boredom increases, hope for success
collapses into disappointment, and the sacrifices that don't pay ofi
lead to disillusionment.
3. Origins and Mobilities
In both entrepreneurial and white-collar patterns of success,
movement upward has been subject to rather severe counter-
tendencies during the course of the twentieth century. No one
knows precisely whether the rate of upward mobility— the pro-
portion of people who rise from one occupational level to another
—has remained constant, declined, or gone up. That rate, how-
ever, depends upon a set of factors that at any given time deter-
mine the chances of those on each level to rise, fall, or hold their
own.
In the past, certain well-known trends supported upward mo-
bility in the entrepreneurial pattern. The most obvious of these
were: the total economic expansion of a society of decentralized
property; the physical spread of markets and the rise in volumes
of production; the industrialization, which rested upon a private
exploitation of unexampled natural resources in a steadily rising
market. In short: the American nineteenth century, when the
entrepreneurial pattern of success seemed almost automatic.
By the 'nineties, however, and increasingly during the twenti-
eth century, the centralization of property worked to decrease
the chances of those lower on the scale to rise to entrepreneur-
ship, to retain and to expand their holdings. Resources were less
accessible to men of small means, access to the higher capital re-
quirements of enterprise more diflBcult; many markets were
monopolized, and as a national whole the market began to have
a lower rate of increase, as birth rates and immigration dropped.
Yet, even as the entrepreneurial was declining as a mass way
of success, the white-collar pattern was opening up. What hap-
pened between the 'nineties and the middle 'thirties is easy to
understand from a few general figures.
The chance to rise is, of course, affected by the ratio of upper
positions to lower aspirants. The wage-worker strata level off and
the white-collar strata expand, so the chance to rise from wage-
SUCCESS 273
worker to white-collar standing increases. Between 1870 and
1930, Eldridge Sibley has calculated, an average of about 150,-
000 workers and farmers per year 'ascended' into white-collar
ranks. But the entrepreneurial stratum declined sharply as a pro-
portion of the total at work. Therefore, we may suppose white-
collar employees to have been recruited from both old middle
class and wage-workers. Of course we can never know the in-
tricate individual patterns of job-shifting within and between the
last two or three American generations that have resulted in the
present division of occupations. We have only fragmentary snap-
shots, most of them recent, of the occupational distances sons
and daughters have moved from the stations of their fathers.
Most of the white-collar workers of the present generation— the
oflBce workers and salespeople— seem to be rather evenly split in
origin between old middle classes and wage-worker strata; about
4 out of 10 have fathers who were free enterprisers, and another
4, urban wage-workers. Over the past three generations, lower
white-collar workers have probably shifted in origin to include
greater proportions of wage- worker children.* The new middle
class itself has expanded so recently that only a small proportion
of the present white-collar generation could be expected to be
of white-collar origin.
The higher white-collar people, salaried professionals and
managerial employees, are less likely to derive from wage-work-
ers and more likely to come from higher levels, or from their
own ranks, t
As white-collar strata have expanded, they have fallen into
line with the over-all historical pattern of occupational structure:
the upper strata became more rigid in the presence of upward
** In a small California town, studied in the middle 'thirties by Percy
Davidson and Dewey Anderson, 46 per cent of the clerks had fathers
who were proprietors, 41 per cent wage-workers. But 55 per cent ol
the fathers who were themselves clerks were the sons of proprietors
and only 29 per cent, wage-workers. Of course, such figures probably
reflect over-all occupational changes as well as shifts in the origins of
white-collar workers.
f In one middle-sized middle-western city in 1945, for example, we
found that 43 per cent of such people, but only 36 per cent of lower
white collar— salespeople and office workers— had fathers who were
free enterprisers. Origins from wage-worker strata of these two groups
were 37 and 46 per cent respectively.
274 STYLES OF LIFE
mobility among the middle and lower. In fact, the rise of white-
collar occupations has allowed for the historical continuance of
American mobility. For while the rise of men from wage-worker
origins into top business positions was definitely curtailed by the
beginning of the twentieth century, the formation of new white-
collar hierarchies allowed for the upward mobility of the wage-
workers to continue.
Even as the new replaces the old middle class, the top levels
of each are being replaced from among its own strata: over one-
third of the business, managerial, and professional people today
derive from the same occupational categories. This rigidity may
be stronger than appears from tables of the origin of the present
labor force, for the statistical snapshot only catches the daughter
of a big businessman as an ofiBce worker; it does not show her as
a young girl in a middle or small-sized city, working as the sec-
retary or receptionist to a friend of her father, leaving in a year
to marry the rising manager of one of the town's largest corpora-
tions, quite different from the carpenter's daughter clerking in
the bargain basement of the town's department store, glancing
up at the floorwalker who passes twice each day, Yet upward
mobility is still prevalent today among the sons of wage-workers
who move into white-collar or business positions. Probably about
one-third of today's small businessmen are sons of wage earners.
Upward mobility between generations has often been ac-
counted for by the low fertility rate of higher social classes. This
difference in fertility is due largely to the later age of marriage,
and the greater use and effectiveness of birth-control measures
among higher-income groups. Now, with rising standards of liv-
ing and broader access to methods of birth control, it is an open
question how long upward mobility based on differing fertility
rates can continue. Also, with the importance of the educational
link in the pattern of success, the father's position is crucial to the
child's. And when, as we have seen, the educational link becomes
insecure, a consciousness of something wrong in middle-class
life becomes more widespread.
Within the individual's lifetime, the chance to rise has been
affected by the shape-up of white-collar jobs. Their concentra-
tion into larger units and their specialization have made for many
SUCCESS 275
blind alleys, lessened the opportunity to learn about 'other de-
partments,' or the business as a whole. The rationalization of
white-collar work means that as the number of replaceable posi-
tions expands more than the number of higher positions, the
chances of climbing decrease. Also, as higher positions become
more technical, they are often more likely to be filled by people
from outside the hierarchy. So the ideology of promotion— the
expectation of a step-by-step ascent, no longer seems a sure
thing. As many as 80 per cent of one large sample of clerical
workers, reported the War Manpower Commission, e.xpected no
promotion.
Yet there is one fact— heavy turnover at the bottom— which
still allows ascent within many large white-collar hierarchies.
The personnel manager of one insurance company, employing
some 14,000 clerks, says: 'To tell you the truth our turnover is
just about as I like it. Turnover of course is relative to the times
and to what goes on in other companies. But our file clerks,
which is the lowest level of clerical work, well, you couldn't find
one here who had worked more than a year at that job. We get
them right from high school. The young girl is what we want,
and in a year they are either promoted or they have gone away.
On the other hand, you can't find any secretaries who have
been here only two or three years; all those better jobs are held
by people who are six to eight years here.' Most of those who
stick rise, a fact made possible by the heavy turnover at the
bottom: the proportion of higher positions to those who com-
pete for them is relatively favorable for advancement.
If anyone is to rise into the white-collar ranks, it must be
from wage-worker levels. What, then, are the chances for the
wage-worker to rise to white-collar status? Suppose we consider
an unskilled worker making about $500 a year in a slump, who
loses his paltry job, can't find other work, and goes on relief.
There were many in this situation; in the middle 'thirties, at
least one-third of the unskilled were out of work.
The chances that this man will become ill are 57 per cent
greater than those of a higher white-collar man making $3000
a year; moreover, according to the national health survey, his
illness will last about 63 per cent longer. If the white-collar man
276 STYLES OF LIFE
(lid become ill, he would get 46 per cent more medical attention
than the unskilled worker.
Suppose this worker gets his old job back or another com-
parable one, and his wife has a child, Robert Woodbury has
calculated that there are almost three times as many chances
that this child will die before he is one year old than is the case
for a white-collar man making only a little better than $1250
a year. But if the worker's child does live, and the worker remains
an unskilled laborer, what are the child's chances to rise?
Many working-class parents want their children to rise above
manual labor, but few know anything about the variety of jobs
in higher spheres or the preparation required for them. The
child himself usually has few convictions about the value of
school, which to him is merely something he must pass through
before he grows up; he also needs more spending money than
his parents can give him. His chance to rise out of manual labor
is in fact very slim if he does not at least finish high school,
but he doesn't know that or think much about it.*
The son of an unskilled laborer has 6 chances in 100 of ever
getting into a college; the son of a professional man has better
than a 50-50 chance. But only 10 per cent of the whole adult
population in 1940 had gone to college. What is the chance of
the worker's son to get above the eighth grade? During the
'thirties it was less than 14 out of 100.
The wage-worker's children leave school because of the finan-
cial need of the family, because they finish high school or trade
school, or because they simply 'dislike school.* Probably half
have no specific occupational plan or ambition, nor do many
parents' aspirations go beyond the vague desire to see the chil-
dren 'get ahead' or get as much schooling as possible. They
usually find out about their first job by random applications at
work-places or through acquaintances and relatives. The only
thing they are likely to know about these jobs before beginning
work is the starting wage, and the majority of jobs, perhaps two-
thirds, are blind alleys.
° For the following account, I have drawn extensively on L. G.
Reynold's and Joseph Shister's Job Horizons (New York: Harper,
1949).
SUCCESS 277
When that first job ends, or the workers quit, they are simply
on the market again, with lower chances of obtaining an educa-
tion and hence lower chances of getting a better job. In San Jose,
California, the unskilled worker's son, in 58 cases out of 100,
will become an unskilled or a semi-skilled laborer. Most workers
probably leave one job before they have a new one lined up,
and they do not have the opportunity to compare jobs, but only
the choice at any given time of accepting this job or of waiting
to see if a better one turns up.
The wage-worker gets married early, so he must earn, and can-
not think seriously of training for skilled work during the first
crucial years of his occupational life. By the time he is twenty-
five, 'the orbit in which he will move for the rest of his life is
firmly established.' He is interested in an 'agreeable life on the
job' as well as the money earned; moreover, his judgment of his
income is made in a frame of comparison with the wages of other
workers around him. The status value of the work is in his mind
when he considers his income, but the money becomes more im-
portant as he acquires more dependent children. He comes to
understand that the good job is scarce and he develops a tech-
nique for hunting such jobs by depending on his friends for 'tips.'
To him, a change of jobs does not mean a job advancement, as
it probably does to more secure middle-class people; it is as
likely to mean the personal disaster of layoflF or unemployment.
Roughly one-third of the wage-workers prefer to remain in
their present jobs; as many as one-fourth want and expect to
move up in their present hierarchy; others who would like to
move up, don't expect to: they see no vacancies in sight, believe
they lack the necessary competence, or feel themselves too old.
In their daydreams about the kind of work they would really
like, workers are concerned about the variety of work, the using
of skills, and contact with other people; as many want white-
collar jobs as want skilled labor; less than a fifth have in mind
small businesses. We have already seen what is likely to happen
to the 0.2 per cent of the adult population who try to start small
businesses and be their own bosses, and we know that farming
is now an economically over-crowded business. Both are risky
dreams, which now affect only small portions of the population.
Workers do not aim at the foreman's job, supposedly their
278 STYLES OF LIFE
classic ambition. They often believe that gaining such a job
would 'upset their friendly relations with other workers.' 'If
you're a foreman, you've got to get so much work out of men; if
you know a man is holding out, you've got to push him along.
When you do that that makes you a no-good guy with the other
men.' 'The supervisors have no friends.' Others don't aspire to
a foreman position because it 'would entail too much responsi-
bility'; or wouldn't 'offer enough job interest.' 'Foremen today
aren't what they used to be forty years ago.'
The ladder for workmen today is not the lower end of one
general ladder leading to white-collar levels; it is a shortened
ladder that does not extend above the wage-worker level. But
that does not mean that working men act and feel as their inabil-
ity to follow the precepts of 'getting ahead' might lead the aca-
demic and inexperienced to expect. The wage-worker comes to
limit his aspirations, and to make them more specific: to get
more money for this job, to have the union change this detail or
that condition, to change shifts next week. In the meantime,
hope of high rates of upward mobility must be largely confined
to those who begin above the wage-worker level.
4. Hard Times
Some of the factors that make for upward mobility or for its
decline are long-run, but many are geared to the ups and downs
of the economic cycle. The old ideology of success assumed that
the structure of opportunity was always expanding: the heights
to be gained and the chances of gaining them seemed to increase
from one generation to the next and within the lifetime of a man.
Moreover, these opportunities were not felt to be threatened by
cyclical ups and downs. Virtually everyone could feel lifted up-
ward, both in income and status, because real income generally
rose, and because each new immigrant group coming in at the
bottom lifted the prestige and jobs of many who had arrived be-
fore them. The new ideology of success assumes that the struc-
ture of opportunity waxes and wanes within a slump-war-boom
economy. Depressions have left heavy traces, noticeable even
during war and boom when opportunities to rise become more
available.
SUCCESS 279
The shift from an economy behaving according to a theory of
Hnear progress to an economy behaving according to theories
of cychcal movement has affected the white-collar strata in two
direct economic ways: (i) their income levels, especially in rela-
tion to those of wage-workers; and (ii) their security of employ-
ment, again in relation to wage-workers.
I. In 1890, as we have already noted, the average income of
the salaried employee was roughly double that of the average
wage-worker. From then until the First World War the salaried
employees' incomes steadily climbed, whereas the climb of wage-
workers' earnings was slowed by the depression which closed
the nineteenth century and which affected wages until the First
World War. Thus, in the early twentieth century the salaried
employee's advantage over the wage-worker was solidly based
on economic facts. The white-collar worlds were just beginning
to expand, so new and wider employment opportunities were
continually being made available to the white-collar employees
who held a monopoly on high-school education. There were no
masses of white-collar workers, who, as a stratum, thus occupied
a select educational and occupational position.
World War I boosted the incomes of both wage- and salary-
workers; but the wage-workers, perhaps being closer to war pro-
duction, being unionized, and reaping the benefits of overtime
pay, had greater increases in income than did salaried employees.
By 1920, the gap between wages and salaries had narrowed: sal-
aried workers in manufacturing were receiving incomes that were
only 65 per cent higher than those of wage-workers, compared
to the 140 per cent advantage of 1900.
The economic dip of 1921— the lowest year of employment be-
fore the 'thirties— hit wage-workers more than salaried employees.
Average wages in manufacturing dropped 13 per cent; salaries
dropped less than three-tenths of one per cent. The favorable
employment and income situation of the white-collar workers
was still in effect, and the average salaries in manufacturing
again rose quickly, by 1924 overtaking their 1920 level. The in-
comes of wage-workers, however, throughout the 'twenties never
regained their 1920 level. Hence, salaried workers gained over
280 STYLES OF LIFE
wage-workers, although their advantage was not so great as in
the early twentieth century.
Between 1929 and 1933, average wages in selected industries
dropped 33 per cent, salaries dropped 20 per cent. The slump hit
the wage-workers harder than the white-collar employees, the
income differences between the two increasing slightly. The sal-
aries that were 82 per cent higher than wages in 1929 were 118
per cent higher in 1933. But the threat of slump, the stigma of
unemployment, and the anxieties surrounding it definitely in-
vaded the white-collar ranks. And the salary advantage held by
the white-collar employees at the peak unemployment did not
last.
World War II benefited wage-workers more than salaried em-
ployees, the difference between their average earnings being re-
duced. But the end of the war, which meant no more overtime in
factories, benefited salaried more than wage-workers. Figures for
1939 and 1948 are interesting, because they suggest long-term
changes affected by the war, but not due to temporary disloca-
tions of war-time conditions. In each of these years, the income
of the white-collar mass— the office and sales people— was lower
than that of the skilled urban wage-workers. These lower white-
collar workers, however, held a margin of advantage over the
semi-skilled, although it had definitely decreased.* The white-
collar income margin over wage-workers has become less, and
whatever margin they still have as a group will most likely be
further decreased in the coming decade. For it is during inflated
periods, when salaries seem more rigid than wages, that white-
collar leveling is most likely to occur.
n. Historical information on unemployment in the United
States is fragmentary, contradictory, and hard to come by, but it
seems likely that before the 'thirties, with the possible exception
* OflBce-men in 1939, for example, received incomes 40 per cent
higher than those of semi-skilled male workers; in 1948, only 9.5 per
cent higher. Salesmen's incomes in 1939 were 19 per cent higher than
those of semi-skilled male workers; in 1948, only 4 per cent. Among
women, the advantage of oflBce employees over semi-skilled workers
was 68 per cent in 1939 but only 22 per cent in 1948; saleswomen,
however, saw their incomes drop below the level of women semi-
skilled workers in 1948.
SUCCESS 281
of 1921, unemployment had involved considerably less than 10
per cent of the total labor force. Employment was at its lowest
point in 1933, when 12.8 million workers, or 25 per cent of the
labor force, were out of work or on relief. By 1936, 17 per cent
of the labor force was still unemployed, and unemployment
stayed near this level until the onset of World War II. Then, un-
employment declined sharply each year until it hit its war-time
low of less than 1 per cent of the labor force in 1944.
White-collar employees are no longer as immune to crises of
unemployment as they once were, but so far unemployment has
been heavier among wage-workers. In 1930 probably 4 per cent
of the new middle class were unemployed, compared with over
10 per cent of the skilled and semi-skilled and about 13 per cent
of the urban unskilled workers. These figures reveal only the be-
ginnings of the slump; by 1937 the worst was over,* but in that
year about 11 per cent of the oflBce and sales people were out of
work or on public emergency work, compared with from 16 to
27 per cent of the urban wage-workers. So the white-collar mar-
gin of job security was probably narrowed during the ten years
before World War 11.
Yet, historically, white-collar employees have been more pro-
tected than wage-workers from unemployment. In large part this
may be due to the special character of white-collar work: 'The
volume of paper work doesn't shrink automatically when produc-
tion falls oflF,' the editors of Business Week observe. 'Sometimes
it even increases— because the company puts on more selling pres-
sure to round up new orders.' Nevertheless, many of the factors
that have protected the white-collar workers are probably weak-
ening in force. During the 'thirties white-collar offices and sales-
rooms were less mechanized than now; as offices have been en-
larged, they have become 'an increased cost' of the business
enterprise. In future depressions, therefore, the incentive to cut
down oSice costs by increased mechanization and white-collar
layoffs will be greater than in the past. Furthermore, many white-
collar jobs have required more training than they do now, and
employers have been reluctant to let trained personnel go. In the
future, however, as more white-collar jobs are routinized, and
* No reliable nation-wide figures for 1933 and 1934 are available.
282 STYLES OF LIFE
the people in them are more easily replaceable, this reluctance
will be minimized. The general educational requirements for
white-collar work are also becoming more widely available. Thus
there are more people available to perform easier tasks, and the
possibility of unemployment increases. Present conditions within
the white-collar world, continuing and emphasizing the historical
trend, thus point to a lesser margin of employment security be-
tween wage-workers and white-collar employees.
5. The Tarnished Image
In the last twenty years, a new style in inspirational literature,
relevant to a new style of aspiration, has risen in the United
States. This literature does not provide its large readership with
techniques for cultivating the old middle-class virtues, nor the
techniques for selling oneself, although, like other inspirational
material, it is concerned with the individual rather than society.
It emphasizes peace of mind and various physical and spiritual
ways of relaxation, rather than internal frenzy in the service of
external and known ambitions. As a literature of resignation, it
strives to control goals and ways of life by lowering the level of
ambition, and by replacing the older goals with more satisfying
internal goals.
This is accomplished, negatively, by tarnishing the old images
of success. In The Hucksters, The Gilded Hearse, Death of a
Salesman, The Big Wheel, the externally successful are por-
trayed as internal failures, as obnoxious, guilt-ridden, ulcerated
people of uneasy conscience, at war with all the peaceful virtues
of the old life and, above all, miserably at war with their tor-
mented selves. T tried to tell myself to snap out of it,' says a
James M. Cain hero, in The Moth, 'that I had everything I had
ever wanted, a dream job, big dough, the respect of the busi-
ness I was in. I had a car, a Packard that just floated. I had an
apartment looking right over the ocean. . . I had a woman with
every kind of looks there was . . . And yet, if it was what I had
been thirsty for, it never came clear, really to quench thirst, but
had bubbles in it, like . . . champagne. . . I felt like life was
nothing but one long string of Christmas afternoons. . . I felt
SUCCESS 283
big and cruel and cold, a thick, heavy-shouldered bunch of what-
ever it takes to be success.'
Positively, the new literature of inspiration holds out internal
virtues, in line with a relaxed consumer's life rather than a tense
producer's. It is the spiritual value, even of material poverty,
available to everyone, which a Reader's Digest or a Peace of
Mind philosophy exemplifies. These are not the old sober virtues
of thrift and industry, nor the drive and style of the displayed
personality, nor the educated skills of the bureaucratic profes-
sions. These are virtues which go with resignation, and the lit-
erature of resignation justifies the lowering of ambition and the
slackening of the old frenzy.
If men are responsible for their success, they are also responsi-
ble for their failure; if success is an individual specification of
social progress, failure is an individual specification of declining
opportunities. But regardless of its true source, failure in the
literature of success is seen as willful, is imputed to the indi-
vidual, and is often internalized by him as guilt, as a competitive
dissatisfaction. The imperative to keep trying, not to slacken oflF,
results in anxiety. But in the literature of resignation, such anxi-
eties are relieved, not by an external success which is considered
to lead to personal unhappiness, but by an internalization of the
goals of success themselves. 'We write successful stories about
unsuccessful people,' says soap-opera producer Frank Hummert.
'This means that our characters are simply unsuccessful in the
material things of life, but highly successful spiritually.'
The literature of the peace of the inner man fits in with the
alienating process that has shifted men from a focus upon pro-
duction to a focus upon consumption. The old success models
indicated the opportunities open to everyone, were intended to
prompt the will to action, and paid attention to all sorts of per-
sonal means to their end. If they held out the end-image of Acres
of Diamonds, they also made those acres seem a natural result of
hard, productive work, or, later, of guileful tricks: at any rate, of
something the individual could do or some change he could make
in himself. But now, as the ambition of many people solidifies into
the unreasoning conscientiousness of the good employee or be-
comes lost in consumer dreams, ambition is often displayed in
movies and novels as a drive polluting men and leading them to
284 STYLES OF LIFE
bad choices. Success entails cash, clothes, cars, and lush women
with couch voices, but it also inevitably means a loss of integrity
and, in the extreme, insanity. For there is a furor about the am-
bitious man, the man dead-bent on success. Increasingly we are
shown The Successful ending up broken, in at least some internal
way. Success is the dead end of an easy street. And when we are
shown the means of success they are as likely to be frankly
miraculous as the result of personal effort or sacrifice; as likely
to be due to a magical stroke of luck, which suddenly turns the
blind alley into an open prairie, as to personal virtue or intel-
ligence.
Just as the 'lucky stroke' magically bolsters hope in an increas-
ingly limited structure of opportunity, so the idea of the 'bad
break' softens feelings of individual failure. Life as a game, as a
sort of lottery brotherhood out of which the main chance will
come— these correspond to the tightening up of stratification and
the increased difficulty of climbing up the ladder for those born
under the lower rungs. Success for many has 'become an acci-
dental and irrational event,' and as a goal has become so daz-
zling that the individual is absorbed in contemplating it, en-
joying it vicariously.
'The distance between what an average individual may do and
the forces and powers that determine his life and death has be-
come so unbridgeable that identification with normalcy, even
with Philistine boredom, becomes a readily grasped empire of
refuge and escape,' observes Leo Lowenthal. 'It is some comfort
for the little man who has become expelled from the Horatio
Alger dream, who despairs of penetrating the thicket of grand
•strategy in politics and business, to see his heroes as a lot of guys
who like or dislike highballs, cigarettes, tomato juice, golf and
social gatherings— just like himself. He knows how to converse
in the sphere of consumption and here he can make no mistakes.'
Before capitalism, men found their occupational level by tradi-
tion and inheritance; jobs were passed on from father to son, by
means of caste rank; or, as in feudalism or peasant societies, each
man did nearly identical work. Under liberal capitalism, men
found their places in the division of labor by competing on an
open market. They put their skills and efforts on the market, to
SUCCESS 285
acquire enterprises or jobs, and there were no formal or tradi-
tional bounds to the extent of their rise. Now, the market begins
to close, and men to come under restrictions and guidance. Eco-
nomic rigidities Hmit ascent, property inheritance or educational
training become necessary to occupational success. Increasingly,
there are attempts to guide by test and counsel, and various oc-
cupational markets are closed up by professional associations,
unions, state licensing systems.
The vocational guide studies individuals and jobs, aiming to fit
the one into the other. To the extent that he succeeds, voca-
tional choice rests upon his studies and consequent advice, rather
than upon the random wishes or 'uninformed' desires of the indi-
vidual. Where ambition and initiative are stressed and yet so
many people must work below their capacities, the problem of
frustration becomes very large. For the goals to which men aspire
can be reached by only a few. Educators and those who run edu-
cational institutions become concerned: they must help children
to construct Valid ambitions,' they must put the brakes on am-
bition, regulate the plans of youth in accordance with what is
possible within the present society— practice a more careful, a
more centralized management of ambition.
There is a curious contradiction about the ethos of success in
America today. On the one hand, there are still compulsions to
struggle, to 'amount to something'; on the other, there is a pov-
erty of desire, a souring of the image of success.
The literature of resignation, of the peace of the inner man,
fits in with all those institutional changes involving the goal of
security and collective ways of achieving it. As insecurities be-
come widespread and their sources beyond the individual's con-
trol, as they become collective insecurities, the population has
groped for collective means of regaining individual security. The
most dramatic means has been the labor union, but demands on
government have resulted in social security, and increasingly the
government intervenes to shape the structure of opportimity.
The governmental pension is clearly of another type of society
than the standard American dream. The old end was an inde-
pendent prosperity, happily surrounded by one's grandchildren;
the end now envisioned is a pensioned security independent of
one's grandchildren. When men fight for pensions, they assume
286 STYLES OF LIFE
that security must be guaranteed by group provision. No longer
can the $5000-a-year man work twenty-five years and retire inde-
pendently on $3000.
Of course, governments have always guaranteed and modified
class chances, by the laws of property, by land policies and
tariffs; but now the tendency of New Deals and Welfare States is
to modify the class chances of lower groups upward, and of
higher groups downward, by minimum-wage laws, graduated in-
come tax, social security; and, except during wars, to guarantee
minimum life chances, regardless of class level. Thus do govern-
ments intervene to keep men more equal.
FOUR
Ways of Power
13
The New Middle Class, II
Ever since the new middle class began numerically to displace
the old, its political role has been an object of query and debate.
The political question has been closely linked with another—
that of the position of new middle-class occupations in modern
stratification.
This linkage of politics and stratification was all the more to be
expected inasmuch as the white-collar man as a sociological crea-
ture was first discovered by Marxian theoreticians in search of
recruits for the proletarian movement. They expected that society
would be polarized into class-conscious proletariat and bour-
geoisie, that in their general decline the in-between layers would
choose one side or the other— or at least keep out of the way of
the major protagonists. Neither of these expectations, however,
had been realized when socialist theoreticians and party bureau-
crats began at the opening of the present century to tinker with
the classic perspective.
In trying to line up the new population into those who could
and those who could not be relied upon to support their struggle,
party statisticians ran squarely into the numerical upsiu-ge of the
white-collar salariat. The rise of these groups as a problem for
Marxists signalized a shift from the simple property versus no-
property dichotomy to differentiations within the no-property
groups. It focused attention upon occupational structure. More-
over, in examining white-collar groups, along with the persistent
small entrepreneurs of farm and city, they came upon the further
fact that although the new middle class was propertyless, and
289
290 WAYS OF POWER
the smaller entrepreneurs often suffered economic downgrading,
members of these strata did not readily take to the socialist ide-
ology. Their political attachments did not coincide with their
economic position, and certainly not with their imminently ex-
pected position. They represented a numerical upthrust of falsely
conscious people, and they were an obstacle to the scheduled
course of the revolution.
1. Theories and Difficulties
To relate in detail all the theories that followed upon these
discoveries and speculations would be more monotonous than
fruitful; the range of theory had been fairly well laid out by the
middle 'twenties, and nothing really new has since been added.
Various writers have come upon further detail, some of it cru-
cial, or have variously combined the major positions, some of
which have had stronger support than others. But the political
directions that can be inferred from the existence of the new
middle class may be sorted out into four major possibilities.
I. The new middle class, in whole or in some crucial seg-
ment, will continue to grow in numbers and in power; in due
course it will develop into a politically independent class. Dis-
placing other classes in performance of the pivotal functions re-
quired to run modern society, it is slated to be the next ruling
class. The accent will be upon the new middle class; the next
epoch will be theirs.
n. The new middle classes will continue to grow in numbers
and power, and although they will not become a force that will
rise to independent power, they will be a major force for sta-
bility in the general balance of the different classes. As important
elements in the class balance, they will make for the continuance
of liberal capitalist society. Their spread checks the creeping pro-
letarianization; they act as a bujBFer between labor and capital.
Taking over certain functions of the old middle class, but having
connections with the wage-workers, they will be able to co-oper-
ate with them too; thus they bridge class contrasts and mitigate
class conflicts. They are the balance wheel of class interests, the
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, II 291
stabilizers, the social harmonizers. They are intermediaries of the
new social solidarity that will put an end to class bickering. That
is why they are catered to by any camp or movement that is
on its way to electoral power, or, for that matter, attempted
revolution.
ui. Members of the new middle class, by their social character
and political outlook, are really bourgeoisie and they will remain
that. This is particularly apparent in the tendency of these groups
to become status groups rather than mere economic classes. They
will form, as in Nazi Germany, prime human materials for con-
servative, for reactionary, and even for fascist, movements. They
are natural allies and shock troops of the larger capitalist drive.
rv. The new middle class will follow the classic Marxian
scheme: in due course, it will become homogeneous in all impor-
tant respects with the proletariat and will come over to their so-
cialist policy. In the meantime, it represents— for various reasons,
which will be washed away in crises and decline— a case of de-
layed reaction. For in historical reahty, the 'new middle class' is
merely a peculiar sort of new proletariat, having the same basic
interests. With the intensification of the class struggle between
the real classes of capitalist society, it will be swept into the pro-
letarian ranks. A thin, upper layer may go over to the bour-
geoisie, but it will not count in numbers or in power.
These various arguments are difficult to compare, first of all
because they do not all include the same occupations under the
catchword 'new middle class.' When we consider the vague
boundary lines of the white-collar world, we can easily under-
stand why such an occupational salad invites so many conflict-
ing theories and why general images of it are likely to differ.
There is no one accepted word for them; white collar, salaried
employee, new middle class are used interchangeably. During
the historical span covered by different theories, the occupational
groups composing these strata have changed; and at given times,
different theorists in pursuit of bolstering data have spotlighted
one or the other groups composing the total. So contrasting
images of the political role of the white-collar people can readily
292 WAYS OF POWER
exist side by side (and perhaps even both be correct). Those,
for instance, who believe that as the vanguard stratum of modem
society they are slated to be the next ruling class do not think of
them as ten-cent store clerks, insurance-agents, and stenog-
raphers, but rather as higher technicians and staff engineers, as
salaried managers of business cartels and big oflBcials of the Fed-
eral Government. On the other hand, those who hold that they
are being proletarianized do focus upon the mass of clerklings
and sales people, while those who see their role as in-between
mediators are most likely to include both upper and lower
ranges. At any rate, in descriptions in Part Two, we have split
the stratum as a whole into at least four sub-strata or pyramids,
and we must pay attention to this split as we try to place white-
collar people in our political expectations.
Most of the work that has been done on the new middle class
and its political role involves more general theories of the course
of capitalist development. That is why it is difiBcult to sort out
in a simple and yet systematic way what given writers really
think of the white-collar people. Their views are based not on an
examination of this stratum as much as on, first, the political pro-
gram they happen to be following; second, the doctrinal position,
as regards the political line-up of classes, they have previously
accepted; and third, their judgment in regard to the main course
of twentieth-century industrial society.
Proletarian purists would disavow white-collar people; United
Fronters would link at least segments of them with workers in a
fight over specific issues, while carefully preserving organiza-
tional and, above all, doctrinal independence; People's Fronters
would cater to them by modifying wage-worker ideology and
program in order to unite the two; liberals of 'Populist' inclina-
tion, in a sort of dogmatic pluralism, would call upon them along
with small businessmen, small farmers, and all grades of wage-
workers to coalesce. And each camp, if it prevailed long enough
for its intellectuals to get into production, would evolve theories
about the character of the white-collar people and the role they
are capable of playing.
As for political doctrines, the very definition of the white-collar
problem has usually assumed as given a more or less rigid frame-
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, II 293
work of fated classes. The belief that in any future struggle be-
tween big business and labor, the weight of the white-collar
workers will be decisive assumes that there is going to be a
future struggle, in the open, between business and labor. The
question of whether they will be either proletariat or bourgeoisie,
thus in either case giving up whatever identity they may already
have, or go their independent way, assumes that there are these
other sides and that their struggle will, in fact if not in con-
sciousness, make up the real political arena. Yet, at the same
time, the theories to which the rise of the new middle class has
given birth distinguish various, independent sectors of the pro-
letariat and of the bourgeoisie, suggesting that the unit of anal-
ysis has been overformalized. The problem of the new middle
class must now be raised in a context that does not merely
assume homogeneous blocs of classes.
The political argument over white-collar workers has gone on
over an international scale. Although modem nations do have
many trends in common— among them certainly the statistical
increase of the white-collar workers— they also have unique fea-
tures. In posing the question of the political role of white-collar
people in the United States, we must learn all we can from dis-
cussions of them in other countries, the Weimar Republic espe-
cially, but in doing so, we must take everything hypothetically
and test it against U.S. facts and trends.
The time-span of various theories and expectations, as we have
noted, has in most of the arguments not been closely specified.
Those who hold the view that white-collar workers are really
only an odd sort of proletariat and will, in due course, begin to
behave accordingly, or the view that the new middle class is
slated to be the next ruling class have worked with flexible and
often conflicting schedules.
What has been at issue in these theories is the objective posi-
tion of the new middle classes within and between the various
strata of modem society, and the political content and direction
of their mentahty. Questions concerning either of these issues
can be stated in such a way as to allow, and in fact demand,
observational answers only if adequate conceptions of stratifica-
tion and of political mentality are clearly set forth.
294 WAYS OF POWER
2. Mentalities
It is frequently asserted, in theories of the white-collar people,
that there are no classes in the United States because 'psychol-
ogy is of the essence of classes' or, as Alfred Bingham has put it,
that 'class groupings are always nebulous, and in the last analysis
only the vague thing called class-consciousness counts/ It is said
that people in the United States are not aware of themselves as
members of classes, do not identify themselves with their appro-
priate economic level, do not often organize in terms of these
brackets or vote along the lines they provide. America, in this
reasoning, is a sandheap of 'middle-class individuals.'
But this is to confuse psychological feelings with other kinds
of social and economic reality. Because men are not 'class con-
scious' at all times and in all places does not mean that 'there
are no classes' or that 'in America everybody is middle class.' The
economic and social facts are one thing; psychological feelings
may or may not be associated with them in expected ways. Both
are important, and if psychological feelings and political out-
looks do not correspond to economic class, we must try to find
out why, rather than throw out the economic baby with the psy-
chological bath, and so fail to understand how either fits into the
national tub. No matter what people believe, class structure as
an economic arrangement influences their life chances according
to their positions in it. If they do not grasp the causes of their
conduct this does not mean that the social analyst must ignore
or deny them.
If political mentalities are not in Ime with objectively defined
strata, that lack of correspondence is a problem to be explained;
in fact, it is the grand problem of the psychology of social strata.
The general problem of stratification and political mentality has
to do with the extent to which the members of objectively defined
strata are homogeneous in their political alertness, outlook, and
allegiances, and with the degree to which their political mentality
and actions are in line with the interests demanded by the juxta-
position of their objective position and their accepted values.
To understand the occupation, class, and status positions of a
set of people is not necessarily to know whether or not they
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, II 295
(1) will become class-conscious, feeling that they belong to-
gether or that they can best realize their rational interests by
combining; (2) will organize themselves, or be open to organi-
zation by others, into associations, movements, or political par-
ties; (3) will have 'collective attitudes' of any sort, including
those toward themselves, their common situation; or (4) will
become hostile toward other strata and struggle against them.
These social, political, and psychological characteristics may
or may not occur on the basis of similar objective situations. In
any given case, such possibilities must be explored, and 'subjec-
tive' attributes must not be used as criteria for class inclusion,
but rather, as Max Weber has made clear, stated as probabilities
on the basis of objectively defined situations.
Implicit in this way of stating the issues of stratification lies
a model of social movements and political dynamics. The im-
portant diflFerences among people are differences that shape their
biographies and ideas; within any given stratum, of course, in-
dividuals differ, but if their stratum has been adequately under-
stood, we can expect certain psychological traits to recur. The
probability that people will have a similar mentality and ideol-
ogy, and that they will join together for action, is increased the
more homogeneous they are with respect to class, occupation,
and prestige. Other factors do, of course, affect the probability
that ideology, organization, and consciousness will occur among
those in objectively similar strata. But psychological factors are
likely to be associated with strata, which consist of people who
are characterized by an intersection of the several dimensions
we have been using: class, occupation, status, and power. The
task is to sort out these dimensions of stratification in a sys-
tematic way, paying attention to each separately and then to its
relation to each of the other dimensions.
The question whether the white-collar workers are a 'new
middle class,' or a 'new working class,' or what not, is not entirely
one of definition, but its empirical solution is made possible only
by clarified definitions. The meaning of the term 'proletarianized,'
around which the major theories have revolved, is by no means
clear. In the definitions we have used, however, proletarianization
might refer to shifts of middle-class occupations toward wage-
296 WAYS OF POWER
workers in terms of: income, property, skill, prestige or power,
irrespective of whether or not the people involved are aware of
these changes. Or, the meaning may be in terms of changes in
consciousness, outlook, or organized activity. It would be pos-
sible, for example, for a segment of the white-collar people to
become virtually identical with wage-workers in income, prop-
erty, and skill, but to resist being like them in prestige claims
and to anchor their whole consciousness upon illusory prestige
factors. Only by keeping objective position and ideological con-
sciousness separate in analysis can the problem be stated with
precision and without unjustifiable assumptions about wage-
workers, white-collar workers, and the general psychology of
social classes.
When the Marxist, Anton Pannekoek for example, refuses to
include propertyless people of lower income than skilled workers
in the proletariat, he refers to ideological and prestige factors.
He does not go on to refer to the same factors as they operate
among the proletariat,' because he holds to what can only be
called a metaphysical belief that the proletariat is destined to
win through to a certain consciousness. Those who see white-
collar groups as composing an independent 'class,' sui generis,
often use prestige or status as their defining criterion rather than
economic level. The Marxian assertion, for example L. B. Bou-
din's, that salaried employees 'are in reality just as much a part
of the proletariat as the merest day-laborer,' obviously rests on
economic criteria, as is generally recognized when his statement
is countered by the assertion that he ignores 'important psycho-
logical factors.'
The Marxist in his expectation assumes, first, that wage-work-
ers, or at least large sections of them, do in fact, or v^l at any
moment, have a socialist consciousness of their revolutionary role
in modem history. He assumes, secondly, that the middle classes,
or large sections of them, are acquiring this consciousness, and
in this respect are becoming like the wage-workers or like what
wage-workers are assumed to be. Third, he rests his contention
primarily upon the assumption that the economic dimension,
especially property, of stratification is the key one, and that it is
in this dimension that the middle classes are becoming like wage-
workers.
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, II 297
But the fact that propertyless employees (both wage-workers
and salaried employees) have not automatically assumed a so-
cialist posture clearly means that propertylessness is not the only
factor, or even the crucial one, determining inner-consciousness
or political will.
Neither white-collar people nor wage-workers have been or
are preoccupied with questions of property. The concentration
of property during the last century has been a slow process rather
than a sharp break inside the life span of one generation; even
the sons and daughters of farmers— among whom the most obvi-
ous 'expropriation' has gone on— have had their attentions fo-
cused on the urban lure rather than on urban propertylessness.
As jobholders, moreover, salaried employees have generally, with
the rest of the population, experienced a secular rise in standards
of living: propertylessness has certainly not necessarily coincided
with pauperization. So the centralization of property, with conse-
quent expropriation, has not been widely experienced as 'agony'
or reacted to by proletarianization, in any psychological sense
that may be given these terms.
Objectively, we have seen that the structural position of the
white-collar mass is becoming more and more similar to that of
the wage-workers. Both are, of course, propertyless, and their
incomes draw closer and closer together. All the factors of their
status position, which have enabled white-collar workers to set
themselves apart from wage-workers, are now subject to definite
decline. Increased rationalization is lowering the skill levels and
making their work more and more factory-like. As high-school
education becomes more universal among wage-workers, and the
skills required for many white-collar tasks become simpler, it is
clear that the white-collar job market will include more wage-
worker children.
In the course of the next generation, a 'social class' between
lower white-collar and wage-workers will probably be formed,
which means, in Weber's terms, that between the two positions
there will be a typical job mobility. This will not, of course, in-
volve the professional strata or the higher managerial employees,
but it will include the bulk of the workers in salesroom and office.
These shifts in the occupational worlds of the propertyless are
298 WAYS OF POWEi?
more important to them than the existing fact of their property-
lessness.
3. Organizations
The assumption that political supremacy follows from func-
tional, economic indispensability underlies all those theories that
see the new middle class or any of its sections slated to be the
next ruling class. For it is assumed that the class that is indis-
pensable in fulfilling the major functions of the social order will
be the next in the sequence of ruling classes. Max Weber in his
essay on bureaucracy has made short shrift of this idea: 'The
ever-increasing "indispensability" of the officialdom, swollen to
millions, is no more decisive for this question [of power] than is
the view of some representatives of the proletarian movement
that the economic indispensability of the proletarians is decisive
for the measure of their social and political power position. If
"indispensability" were decisive, then where slave labor prevailed
and where freemen usually abhor work as a dishonor, the "in-
dispensable" slaves ought to have held the positions of power,
for they were at least as indispensable as officials and proletarians
are today. Whether the power ... as such increases cannot be
decided a priori from such reasons.'
Yet the assumption that it can runs all through the white-collar
literature. Just as Marx, seeing the parasitical nature of the capi-
talist's endeavor, and the real function of work performed by
the workers, predicted the workers' rise to power, so James Bum-
ham (and before him Harold Lasswell, and before him John
Corbin ) assumes that since the new middle class is the carrier of
those skills upon which modem society more and more depends,
it will inevitably, in the course of time, assume political power.
Technical and managerial indispensability is thus confused with
the facts of power struggle, and overrides all other sources of
power. The deficiency of such arguments must be realized posi-
tively: we need to develop and to use a more open and flexible
model of the relations of political power and stratffication.
Increasingly, class and status situations have been removed
from free market forces and the persistence of tradition, and
been subject to more formal rules. A government management
THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS, II 299
of the class structure has become a major means of alleviating
inequalities and insuring the risks of those in lower-income
classes. Not so much free labor markets as the powers of pres-
sure groups now shape the class positions and privileges of vari-
ous strata in the United States. Hours and wages, vacations, in-
come security through periods of sickness, accidents, unemploy-
ment, and old age— these are now subject to many intentional
pressures, and, along with tax policies, transfer payments, tariffs,
subsidies, price ceilings, wage freezes, et cetera, make up the
content of 'class fights' in the objective meaning of the phrase.
The 'Welfare State* attempts to manage class chances without
modifying basic class structure; in its several meanings and types,
it favors economic policies designed to redistribute life-risks and
life-chances in favor of those in the more exposed class situations,
who have the power or threaten to accumulate the power, to do
something about their case.
Labor union, farm bloc, and trade association dominate the
political scene of the Welfare State as well as of the permanent
war economy; contests within and between these blocs increas-
ingly determine the position of various groups. The state, as a
descriptive fact, is at the balanced intersection of such pressures,
and increasingly the privileges and securities of various occupa-
tional strata depend upon the bold means of organized power.
It is often by these means that the objective position of white-
collar and wage-worker becomes similar. The greatest difficulty
with the Marxist expectation of proletarianization is that many
changes pointing that way have not come about by a lowering
of the white-collar position, but often more crucially by a raising
of the wage-worker position.
The salary, as contrasted with the wage, has been a tradi-
tional hall-mark of white-collar employment. Although still of
prestige value to many white-collar positions, the salary must
now be taken as a tendency in most white-collar strata rather
than a water-tight boundary of the white-collar worlds. The con-
trast has rested on difiFerences in the time-span of payment, and
thus in security of tenure, and in the possibilities to plan because
of more secure expectations of income over longer periods of
time. But, increasingly, companies put salaried workers, whose
salary for some time in many places has been reduced for ab-
300 WAYS OF POWER
sences, on an hourly basis. And manual workers, represented by
unions, are demanding and getting precisely the type of priv-
ileges once granted only white-collar people.
All along the line, it is from the side of the wage-workers that
the contrast in privileges has been most obviously breaking down.
It was the mass-production union of steel workers, not salaried
employees, that precipitated a national economic debate over the
issue of regularized employment; and white-collar people must
often now fight for what is sometimes assumed to be their in-
herited privilege: a union of professionals, The Newspaper
Guild, has to insist upon dismissal pay as a clause in its con-
tracts.
Whatever past difFerences between white-collar and wage-
workers with respect to income security, sick benefits, paid vaca-
tions, and working conditions, the major trend is now for these
same advantages to be made available to factory workers. Pen-
sions, especially since World War II, have been a major idea in
collective bargaining, and it has been the wage-worker that has
had bargaining power. Social insurance to cover work injuries
and occupational diseases has gradually been replacing the com-
mon law of a century ago, which held the employee at personal
fault for work injury and the employer's liability had to be
proved in court by a damage suit. In so far as such laws exist,
they legally shape the class chances of the manual worker up to
a par with or above other strata. Both privileges and income
level have been increasingly subject to the power pressures of
unions and government, and there is every reason to believe that
in the future this will be even more the case.
The accumulation of power by any stratum is dependent on a
triangle of factors: will and know-how, objective opportunity,
and organization. The opportunity is limited by the group's struc-
tural position; the will is dependent upon the group's conscious-
ness of its interests and ways of realizing them. And both struc-
tural position and consciousness interplay with organizations,
which strengthen consciousness and are made politically rele-
vant by structural position.
14
White-Collar Unionism
Flint, Mich., 18 December 1945. Only
25 to 30 pickets were on duty this
morning when the police, under the
leadership of Capt. Gus Hawkins, drove
parallel lines through the midst of the
strikers. About 500 white collar work-
ers went into the plant through the
police corridor. There was no disorder,
the workers giving way as they hissed
and booed the salaried and clerical per-
sonnel of the plant. Then the police
withdrew to permit an orderly resump-
tion of orderly picketing. Declaring
that he would have 10,000 men on
hand in the morning. Jack F. Holt,
regional director of the U.A.W., said :
'We'll see if they can get through
10,000 men.'
The best chance to organize the white
collar people, said the expert organizer
with 30 years practical experience, is
to get them where they see how the
workers have made gains, and how
powerful the workers are when they
mass pickets and go on strike. In my
long experience wherever there's strong
wage worker unions they'll all come
into the union in tliose places. . .
In a letter to Mr. Kirby, president of
the NAM, Mr. Emery, counsel for the
NAM, wrote in 1912 : The time is at
hand when the Sixteenth Amendment
will provide for the possession of a
union card for the president [of the
United States].
Flint, Mich., 19 December 1945. After
standing about in near zero weather
for nearly two hours, 500 office work-
ers who walked into the plant through
a corridor formed by police yesterday,
when only a token picket line was on
duty, dispersed.
New York City, 30 March 1948. At
8:55 this morning violence broke out
in Wall Street. Massed pickets from
local 205 of the United Financial Em-
ployees union, supported by members
of an AFL seamen's union, knocked
over four policemen at the entrance
to the stock exchange and lay down
on the sidewalk in front of the doors.
One hundred police officers swarmed
up and, in several knots of furious
club-swinging, 12 people were hurt, 45
seized and arrested. The outbreak was
over in 30 minutes, but most of the
day, 1200 massed pickets surrounded
the stock exchange building and
shouted epithets at those who entered
the building. . .
Show me two white collar workers on
a picket line, said Mr. Samuel Gompers,
president of the AFL, and I'll organize
the entire working class.
|n the minds of the white-collar workers a struggle has been
going on between economic reality and anti-union feeling. What-
ever their aspirations, white-collar people have been pushed by
twentieth-century facts toward the wage-worker kind of organ-
ized economic life, and slowly their illusions have been moving
301
302
WAYS OF POWER
into closer harmony with the terms of their existence. They are
becoming aware that the world of the old middle class, the com-
munity of entrepreneurs, has given way to a new society in
which they, the white-collar workers, are part of a world of de-
pendent employees. Now alongside unions of steel workers and
coal miners, there are unions of oflBce workers and musicians,
salesgirls and insurance men.
What is the extent of white-collar unionism? What causes
white-collar workers to accept or reject unionism, and what is its
meaning to them? What bearing do white-collar unions have on
the shape of American labor unions as a whole? On the possibili-
ties of a democratic political economy in the United States?
White
Wage-
Collar
Worker
Total
1900
2.5%
8.2%
6.5%
1920
8.1%
21.5%
17.9%
1935
5.0%
12.1%
9.6%
1948
16.2%
44.1%
34.5%
1. The Extent Organized
By the opening of the twentieth century, 8.2 per cent of the
wage-workers and 2.5 per cent of the white-collar employees
were in unions. Here are the proportions organized for selected
years since then:
After 1915, with profitable
business, growing labor scar-
city, and an easier Federal
Government attitude, the pro-
portions of wage-workers and
white-collar people in unions
nearly doubled; by 1920 some
8.1 per cent of the white-collar and 21.5 per cent of the wage-
workers were in unions, a total of nearly five million people. Con-
trary to the general rule, the prosperity of the 'twenties did not
bring a union boom, for technical advances were so great they
created labor surpluses even in boom time; industries benefiting
most from the boom were not unionized, while the boom in
unionized industries was not so great; and the prevailing craft-
type unions were not in harmony with the mass-production tech-
niques which were rapidly coming to the fore.
With the slump, the unions lost heavily: by 1935 only 5.0 per
cent of the white-collar and 12.1 per cent of the wage- workers
were in unions: a total of 3.4 millions. But that year the tide
turned. Legislation establishing the right to unionize; a favor-
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 303
able sequence of court decisions; an atmosphere of official friend-
liness and of worker receptivity; the wider advent of industrial
unionism; and finally, implementing all these, the war boom with
its tight labor market— these developments in labor's decade
brought the 1948 proportion of organized wage-workers to 44.1
per cent and of white-collar workers to 16.2 per cent. Unions for
wage-workers grew more, if for no other reason than that the
great organizing drives were centered in them. In comparing the
proportion of wage-workers with white-collar employees in
unions we must also keep in mind that white-collar unionism has
faced an uphill fight: in the first 48 years of this century the
number of potential white-collar unionists increased 406 per cent
(from 3.7 to 14.7 million), while potential wage- worker unionists
increased only 320 per cent (from 9.1 to 29 million).
White-collar unionism is now beyond the position of wage-
workers' in the middle 'thirties, when 12.1 per cent of the wage-
workers were organized. Today, with 16.2 per cent of the white-
collar workers already in unions, and the 'white-collar mass in-
dustries' practically untouched, American labor unions are in a
much better position to undertake white-collar unionization. The
law is favorable and perhaps soon will be more so; the unions
have money to put into it; they have more skilled and experi-
enced organizers; there is general prosperity, yet some still fear
slump; the unions are working in a friendly political atmos-
phere, and moreover one created, as they see it, to a great extent
by their power— power which, over the last decade and a half,
has given the unions much greater prestige. With all these as-
sets, there is no doubt that, given the will and the intelligence,
organizing drives among unorganized white-collar workers could
be successfully carried through. Yet as of now, 84 per cent of
white-collar workers are still not in unions.
The historical centers of white-collar unionism have been rail-
roading, government, and entertainment. Before World War I,
these three fields together accounted for between 64 and 77 per
cent, and during the 'twenties and early 'thirties, for over 85
per cent, of all unionized white-collar people. Only with the or-
ganizing drives of the latter 'thirties did thev lose their relative
304 WAYS OF POWER
ascendency, although even today they contain 58 per cent of all
white-collar unionists.
One might suppose that white-collar unions would be strong in
areas where wage-worker unions flourish, but this is the case
only in certain industries, such as railroads. During the first third
of the century, labor unions meant largely unions in coal mining,
railroading, and building trades. During the First World War,
clothing, shipbuilding, and the metal trades entered the union
world. None of these industries, except railroading, contains con-
centrations of white-collar workers. So the industries in which
unionism has centered preclude a clear historical test of the idea
that white-collar unions flourish when they supplement wage-
worker unions.
Today, the industries in which substantial numbers of white-
collar employees are organized include transportation, communi-
cation, entertainment, and one branch of the Federal Govern-
ment, the Postal Service. In all other areas, including manufac-
turing and retafl trade, the proportion organized is never more
than 10 per cent, seldom more than 4 or 5.
2. Acceptance and Rejection
The acceptance or rejection of unions depends upon employees'
awareness of their objective problems and recognition of unions
as means for meeting them. For people to accept unions obvi-
ously requires that unions be available to them, and moreover,
that they view unions as instruments for achieving desired aims
rather than in terms of the illusions about unions so often current
in white-collar circles.
Objective circumstances of the work situation influence the
white-collar employees' psychology when they are confronted
with the idea of joining a union. By and large, these are not dif-
ferent from those affecting the organizability of wage-workers,
and include: strategic position in the technological or marketing
processes of an industry, which conditions bargaining power; un-
fair treatment by employers, which creates a high state of griev-
ance; a helpful legal framework, which protects the right to or-
ganize; a profitable business but one in which labor costs form
a small proportion of the cost of production, which means that
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 305
higher wages will not severely affect total costs; relative per-
manency of employment and of labor force, so that organization
may be stable.
The relation to the 'boss' is an often crucial and usually com-
plicated matter. On the one hand, the technological and educa-
tional similarity of white-collar work to the work of the boss; the
physical nearness to him; the prestige borrowed from him; the
rejection of wage-worker types of organization for prestige rea-
sons; the greater privileges and securities; the hope of ascent— all
these, when they exist, predispose the white-collar employee to
identify with the boss. On the other hand, there is fear and even
hatred of the boss. In fact, loyalty to management, advanced by
white-collar employees, is often, unknown even to them, an inse-
cure cover-up for fear of reprisal. In one office, for example, dur-
ing a union drive, ten old employees held out firmly: 'We're per-
fectly happy in our jobs. We like to work here. We make enough
to live on, maybe as much as we're worth. And besides, our boss,
who is a real gentleman, is doing all he can afford to do for us.'
The company's attitude toward the union was outspokenly bitter;
but soon, because of pressure from the already organized sales
force, it shifted to acquiescence. Then, almost overnight, the at-
titude of the ten old-line employees also shifted; they began to
spill grievances, their one great fear now being that they might
not be allowed to join the union. They expressed their intimately
felt disapproval of the boss's ways, and one of them even re-
ported daydreams of heavy ledgers dropping from tall filing cases
on the boss's head.
Although acceptance of unions does involve some sense of the
separateness of one's economic interest from that of the boss and
the company, the attitude to management is not an explicit, sim-
ple key to the psychology of white-collar unionism. The white-
collar organizer finds other psychological circumstances lying
deeper and variously reflected by the white-collar man or woman
he approaches. Three general indices to these circumstances,
each involving a whole complex of accompanying feelings and
opinions, are involved in 'white-collar' appraisals of unions:
I, One major reason white-collar employees often reject unions
is that unions have not been available to them. An immensely
306 WAYS OF POWER
greater effort over a longer period of time has been given to
wage-worker unionism. For most white-collar employees to join
or not to join a union has never been a live question, for no union
has been available, or, if it has, was not energetically urging affili-
ation. For these employees, the question has been to organize or
not to organize a union, which is a very different proposition from
joining or not joining an available union.
Moreover, unless they are themselves unionized, white-collar
workers usually have relatively little personal contact with union
personnel or with friends or relatives who are union members.
Being personally in contact with union leaders and union mem-
bers, however, is a decisive factor in one's union attitude. In the
absence of such contact and given the general hostile atmosphere
that prevails in many white-collar circles, an anti-union attitude
often results. Personal exposure to unions not only reveals their
benefits, but sometimes creates a social situation in which those
who don't belong feel socially ostracized. More generally, con-
tacts with union people tend to discount anti-unionism; in fact,
they seem to be the most single important antidote.
n. The political party affiliations of white-collar employees and
their families buttress their union feelings. Although some white-
collar groups have tended to shift from their parents' Democratic
or Republican tradition to an independent position, generally
stated as voting for 'the best man,' but frequently coming to
mean Republican, most remain in the same party as their parents.
People generally come into contact with party rhetoric before
they do union rhetoric, and this affects their receptivity to union
proposals. Part>' identifications are closely associated with union
attitude: third-party and Democratic people tend to be more
pro-union than Independents or Republicans. The New Deal, and
especially the personality of President Roosevelt, did more for
unions than create an encouraging legal framework; it raised the
prestige value of unions, and for many middle-class groups, it
did much to neutralize the prestige depreciation which joining
had entailed. It made the union a more respectable feature of
American life, and since the New Deal, the union's public suc-
cess and increased power have further supported its increased
respectability.
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 307
III. Not job dissatisfaction in general, but a specific kind of job
dissatisfaction— the feeling that as an individual he cannot get
ahead in his work— is the job factor that predisposes the white-
collar employee to go pro-union. This opinion is more important
in the conscious psychology of white-collar unionism than the
good or bad will of the company, the degree of job routinization,
et cetera. There is a close association between the feeling that
one cannot get ahead, regardless of the reason, and a pro-union
attitude: 'I don't think there are any chances . . . only a few
can get promotion ... I would join a union . , . we are ex-
ploited. . .' But others say: T think there's a good chance to get
ahead. It's entirely up to you. An assistant to the boss is going to
leave. I've got the opportunity to step in there. . . Maybe with
more training I can be the boss. . . If I don't make good it's my
own fault. . . I really don't see what you gain from belong-
ing. . .'
Personal exposure to unions, political party affiliation, and feel-
ings about individual chances to climb— these three factors pre-
dispose white-collar people to accept unions.* And each of these
predisposing factors is generally moving in the direction of pro-
unionism: despite some counter-tendencies during the war, indi-
vidual ascent chances and hopes will probably continue to de-
cline for white-collar people. The 1948 Democratic victory fur-
ther increased the respectability of the 'liberal' political column
and hence the numbers in it. And if, as labor grows, white-collar
drives get underway, more and more white-collar people will be
exposed, directly or indirectly, to unionism.
The white-collar worker may accept or reject unions (1) in
terms of their instrumental value, seeing them as ways to realize
* Among a small group (128) of white-collar people intensively
studied, 85 per cent of those with strong predisposition (all three
factors positive), 53 per cent of the intermediate (1 or 2 factors),
and none of the weakly predisposed felt favorable to unions. At the
other end of the scale, none of the strongly predisposed, 16 per cent
of the intermediate, and 75 per cent of the weakly predisposed were
anti-union.
People who have experienced only one or two, but not all, of these
three factors turn out to be on-the-fence about unionization, for they
have been under contradictory influences: their hope of ascent is dim
but they have not been personally exposed to unions; or their politics
are against unions but they have been favorably exposed to unions;
or, if they are liberals, perhaps they see a good chance of ascent.
308 WAYS OF POWER
economic and job benefits; or in terms of principle, seeing them
as good or bad in themselves with no concern over their immedi-
ate effects on his hfe; (2) in terms of himself and his own job
situation, or in terms of 'other people' and their job situations.
In the mass media of communication, unions are more likely
to be presented ideologically than as helpful instrumentalities.
'Union news' is seldom presented 'up close,' in such a way that
members of the public could easily identify with unions as prac-
tical means to their own practical ends. So some ideological
counter-force is often needed if unions are to be accepted on
principle, or, as is more usual, if principled rejection is to be
by-passed and the instrumental benefits of unions understood.
That ideological counter-force is often summed up in political-
party identification. Unless the non-unionized white-collar worker
has been influenced by liberal political-party rhetoric, there is
little chance that he will accept unions for himself on principle.
Given the generally hostile atmosphere, still carried by the
mass media, there is undoubtedly more principled rejection than
principled acceptance of the unions. Pro-union ideology serves
primarily to clear away principled objections in order that an in-
strumental view may come to the fore. One reason personal con-
tact with union members weighs so heavily in pro-unionism is
that such contact frequently results in a more instrumental type
of judgment. Then various interest factors, notably feelings
about ascent chances, can become decisive.
Unions are usually accepted as something to be used, rather
than as something in which to believe. They are understood as
having to do strictly with the job and are valued for their help
on the job. They rest upon, and perhaps carry further, the alien-
ated split of 'job' from 'life.' Acceptance of them does not seem
to lead to new identifications in other areas of living.
3. Individual Involvement
One might suppose that pro-unionism would involve greater
feelings of solidarity among co-workers, and greater antagonism
toward the higher-ups or the company. But this is not necessarily
the case: those white-collar workers who are in unions or who
are pro-union in outlook do not always display more co-worker
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 309
solidarity than those not in unions or who are anti-union in feel-
ing. Equal proportions on either side are competitively oriented
toward co-workers, see co-workers off the job, are friendly with
them, have a feeling of belonging to the work-group rather than
just happening to be there, and feel estranged from the company
or the higher-ups.
In the union or out of it, for it, against it, or on the fence, the
white-collar employee usually remains psychologically the little
individual scrambling to get to the top, instead of a dependent
employee experiencing unions and accepting union affiliation as
collective means of collective ascent. This lack of effect of unions
is of course linked with the reasons white-collar people join
them: to most members, the union is an impersonal economic
instrument rather than a springboard to new personal, social, or
political ways of life.
The main connection between union and individual member is
the fatter pay check, a fact which is in line with the general
American accent on individual pecuniary success, as well as the
huckstering animus of many union organizers. Unions, 'instru-
mentally' accepted, are alternatives to the traditional individu-
alistic means of obtaining the traditional goals of success. They
are collective instruments for pursuing individual goals; belong-
ing to them does not modify the goals, although it may make the
member feel more urgently about these goals. Union organizers
are salesmen of the idea, as one organizing pamphlet for white-
collar employees puts it, that 'You can get it, too!' and 'Union
organization is the modern way to go places.' The prevailing
strategy is to by-pass the status, the ideology, and the politics
and to stress economic realities and benefits. The only status ap-
peal, a kind of hard-boiled 'keeping up' tactic, is still focused on
the pay lag between white-collar and wage-worker: 'If you are
not organized, the world is passing you by!'
Yet, despite the dominant ways unions are sold and accepted,
there are indications that they often mean more to white-collar
people: 'I feel I have somebody at the back of me.' 'I have a feel-
ing that we are all together and strong— you are not a ball at
the feet of the company.' 'The union, it's my protection.' 'You
feel you are not being pushed around.' These apparently simple
and straightforward feelings in reality rest upon complex factors
310 WAYS OF POWER
of prestige claims and economic security and upon certain inter-
vals of exciting powerfulness which the union has brought into
the routine and often dreary white-collar life. In such intervals,
the union appears as a social force on the job with which em-
ployees can identify positively; and with this, the company and
its higher-ups appear as counter-forces about which the em-
ployee feels ambiguous or negative.
The fact that union affairs can be exciting during times of
struggle must not be underestimated in the union's appeal to the
white-collar people. Generally it is only then that the union,
rather than an unattended instrument, becomes a social norm—
'When you work with people and they belong, you feel you
should belong too'— as well as a welcome variation from normal
work routines: 'During the strike we had a couple of months ago
we talked a lot . . . we were out two days and got an increase
of $2.00 . . . we had a meeting about a week before the strike.
That was probably the most exciting thing that happened at
work. It made it sort of exciting to go to work. Everybody was
talking about it. It was something different from every other day.
I felt I had a part in it. . ,'
Resentment, slowly produced by the routine of dull work, finds
an outlet in strong anti-company and strong pro-union loyalties,
but to hold these loyalties, unions, like any other institution, must
operate dramatically as well as in the obvious interests of the
members. Perhaps nothing is so exciting to the employee, apart
from a strike, as the union's 'investigating the company.' 'They
said that that was the reason— they couldn't afford it. But they
have paid off a million-dollar loan and still have a miUion in the
bank. They have it. The union had them investigated. You should
have seen the head's face when he found out.'
In all this, white-collar unionism does not differ markedly from
those wage-worker unions we have had occasion to study. The
UAW member in Detroit, for example, does not differ in his
union attitude very markedly from members of New York City
white-collar unions. Both are after, in the first instance, better
conditions of work, especially more pay and more secure pay,
and both consciously get 'protection' out of unions. More sys-
tematically, the union performs four functions in the employee's
life:
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 311
I. Economically, unions mean economic advances and protec-
tion against arbitrary wage action. The fruits of increased pro-
ductivity, brought about by the rationalization of white-collar
work, are not automatically passed on to the employee: only by
organizations that force bargaining and concessions can white-
collar workers make economic gains. They cannot continue in-
definitely to benefit from wage-workers' organizations— as they
have undoubtedly been doing in many industries— and not shoul-
der part of the risk and the work involved.
Differences in what various unions fight for reflect diflFerences
in employer policy more than differences in union philosophy.
The trend in white-collar unions seems to be to line up salaries
and conditions with those of other organized white-collar workers
rather than with the pattern prevailing in the same industry
among production workers. Yet the plain economic struggle of
white-collar workers will continue, whether or not they have
unions, to be part of the fight of labor as a whole, of carpenters
and auto workers and coal diggers. It will not have any auton-
omy, as the economic struggle of a separated group, because of
any economically peculiar position white-collar people may think
they occupy. Although, as more white-collar people are union-
ized, their share in deciding the terms of the struggle may be-
come greater, their economic struggle is not diflFerent from that
of the wage-workers.
The privileges that white-collar employees have traditionally
enjoyed are being formalized in the union contracts they secure;
and, as National Industrial Conference Board studies have
shown, it is in this area of 'fringe benefits' that their contracts
differ most from wage-workers'. White-collar contracts are usu-
ally much more likely than those of production workers' to con-
tain welfare clauses: personal leaves, paid sick leaves, sever-
ance pay, holiday and vacation rules. Yet the formalization of
such privileges, in white-collar contracts, comes at a time when
wage-worker unions are also seriously beginning to fight for
them, as well as for the more solid privileges of medical and
pension plans.
n. If the unions raise the level and security of the employees'
income, at the same time they may lower the level and security
312 WAYS OF POWER
of prestige. For in so far as white-collar claims for prestige rest
upon differences between themselves and wage-workers, and in
so far as the organizations they join are pubhcly associated
with worker organizations, one of the bases of white-collar pres-
tige is done away with. White-collar people are often quite aware
of this: 'It is not possible that a union would start in my busi-
ness, but if it did I do not think I would join because . . . people
think less of you. Management unconsciously thinks that people
who belong to a union have not enough sense to talk for them-
selves.'
The status psychology of white-collar employees is part of a
'principled' rejection of unionism, although it often has instru-
mental content as well: the hope of being judged by manage-
ment as different from wage-workers, and so of climbing by tra-
ditional individual means. Apart from this, the prestige claims are
purely invidious and principled; and usually are overcome only
when the employee, by personal contact, comes to see the union
as an instrument, is exposed to more liberal political rhetoric,
and, above all, has lost his hope of ascent by individual rneans.
However widespread the prestige resistances to unions may
now be, solid, long-run factors are acting to reduce them, for
these are the same factors we saw affecting general white-collar
prestige: lack of differences between wage- worker and white-
collar income; white-collar unemployment, as during the 'thirties;
the breakdown of the white-collar monopoly on high-school edu-
cation; the inevitable reduction of the claims of white-collar
people for prestige based on their not being 'foreign-born, like
workers'; the concentration of white-collar workers into big work
places and their down-grading and routinization; the mere in-
crease in the total numbers of white-collar people— all these fac-
tors and trends are tearing away the foundations of the white-
collar rejection of unions on the basis of prestige.
Today white-collar workers and their organizations use many
dodges to avoid identification with wage-workers and yet secure
the benefits of unionism. They call their unions 'guilds' or 'associ-
ations'; they have a permanent no-strike policy, et cetera. In the
end all this is nonsense so far as the central economic purpose of
unions is concerned; yet, although their sacrifice of prestige is
the sacrifice of a fading value, this value is still real to white-
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 315
collar employees, often more so than their low incomes. In his
appeal the union organizer has to balance the prestige loss
against the economic gains: in the short run, the loss is greatly
softened by the strictly instrumental way unionism is accepted;
in the long run, objective forces will destroy the bases of such
claims for higher prestige.
m. Unionism objectively means a declaration of collective in-
dependence, and, correspondingly, a tacit acceptance of indi-
vidual dependence. We have seen how closely the feeling that
one has no individual chance to rise is related to a pro-union atti-
tude. White-collar unions, like those of wage-workers', are in part
a consequence of a rationalization of the work process. For only
an organization can talk back and exert power over the condi-
tions of such work and over the work-life itself. In their quest for
occupational justice— equal conditions and equal pay for equal
grades of work— the unions further rationalization of work, while
at the same time shaping it more to the interests of the work
group as a whole. Regardless of the union's ideology, the task of
the job-description committee, soon at work in many union
drives, is to reorganize the personnel hierarchy of the company,
incidentally wiping out many prestige distinctions without eco-
nomic content cultivated by management or allowed to encrust
on the hierarchy by usage. Sometimes this creates active resent-
ment among employees: I'm not sure I'd want to join. . . My
friend says they brow-beat them in her office. They walk up and
down the office and watch what people are doing, and if a file
girl types even a label, they threaten to have her fired.'
The employees' modern choice is not between individual inde-
pendence and individual dependence on the employer. Unions
are devices by which collections of people get done what the em-
ployer is in a position to do for himself, and what in a simpler
age of more kindly exploitation employees were in a position to
do for themselves individually. As the union lessens the employ-
ees' dependence upon the employer, it substitutes dependence
upon the union, an organization expected to act more in accord-
ance with their interests. In many industries, the union is an ad-
ditional bureaucracy, seeking to influence the way employees are
geared into the larger bureaucracy of the business. Within the
314 WAYS OF POWER
company, the unionized white-collar worker associates himself
with a new sort of personnel organization, one having his inter-
ests in mind; to the extent that his union is internally democratic,
he gains a collective voice with which he shouts to the top of the
company about his specific job and his individual grievances. In-
side the oflBce and salesroom and up in the front of the plant,
unions increase the collective power of the white-collar employee
over the conditions and the security of his work-life.
rv. The power of the union, white-collar or otherwise, is also
exerted in the political economy, where, to the extent that they
are members of effective national unions, the power of the white-
collar employees increases. For, as union members, they are rep-
resented by organized pressure groups that are increasingly ef-
fective in the politics of economic bargaining.
4. The Shape of Unionism
Since at least the 'thirties the organization of white-collar work-
ers has been a standard item on the liberal-labor agenda, but the
political meaning of such organization is not often seriously dis-
cussed. Suppose that 8 or 9 million of the 12.3 million unorgan-
ized white-collar people were in the unions— what would it mean
for the political character and direction of U.S. labor?
To answer this question we must consider: i, whether white-
collar unionism has or is likely to develop a mentality and direc-
tion of its own; n, whether white-collar unions tend to display
more or less militancy than wage-worker unions; and iii, whether
or not, and in what sense, an enlargement of white-collar unions
might constitute 'labor's link to the middle class.'
I. Throughout the present century, the AFL has remained
dominant in the white-collar field. In 1900, white-collar unionists
were evenly divided between AFL and independent unions; since
then the AFL proportion has grown and by 1935 contained two-
thirds of all unionized white-collar workers. The rise of the CIO
has only slightly weakened AFL dominance in the white-collar
field; for the big CIO organizing drives were in mass industrial
rather than white-collar areas. As of 1948, 62 per cent of all un-
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 315
ionized white-collar employees were in the AFL, 22 per cent
in independent unions, and 16 per cent in the CIO. If we turn
these figures around, and compute the white-collar proportions
within each union bloc, 21 per cent of all independent unionists
were white-collar workers, 19 per cent of all AFL members, and
only 8 per cent of all CIO union members.
If more white-collar workers are organized, they will most
likely, under present conditions, be organized by existing labor
organizations. In the fall of 1948, CIO heads did announce a
white-collar drive, and since then various moves have been made
to get it under way. In so far as they were serious about it, they
were probably impelled, in addition to the standard motive of
protecting these workers' interests, by certain political considera-
tions. Within the CIO, 'the white-collar drive' was a drive against
certain highly vocal Communist elements, which top CIO men
wished to be rid of. The way to upset as well as to gain union
power is to organize and counter-organize. They also desired, in
the current political phase, to overtake and surpass AFL unions
in the numbers of enrolled members. The white-collar fields are
new frontiers, which involve a minimum of jurisdictional tangle.
Many CIO leaders are young, ambitious men who have already
organized their initially chosen fields; a white-collar drive ofi^ers
an outlet for their energies; organizing drives are power accumu-
lators for leaders no less than for workers. Also some older lead-
ers, recently risen to top power in their middle age, might wish to
make their own marks; in trade-union circles, this means to or-
ganize. Labor leaders, in and out of the CIO, probably think that
white-collar organizing will increase their political pull in the
'middle-class' area, and thus improve the unions' public relations.
In so far as they are contenders for power and influence in one
or the other of the standard political parties, they look upon in-
clusion of white-collar people in their unions as a winning card
in contests within and between party and state.
The chance for a freewheeling bloc of white-collar unions sep-
arate from the existing blocs seems very slight, in part because
of the existing union set-up, and in part because white-collar
employees, and potential leaders among them, have no firm ideo-
logical or practical reasons to wish to play an independent part.
In the existing union world, wage-worker unions have the prior-
316 WAYS OF POWER
ity of organization; their base is so large and firm that in our time
white-collar people, even if completely organized, would not be
able to achieve dominance. Organization requires money; in the
modern accounting system of unionism, so much a head is re-
quired; in a world of big business, big government, and big un-
ions, small unions without funds fall behind or are swallowed by
larger ones.
White-collar organization in the 'fifties is less likely to be spon-
taneous or to come from the bottom up than was the case in the
'thirties. Organizations are likely to be initiated from the top by
existing union powers, for when unionization is quasi-spontane-
ous, new and more militant leaders have better chances to come
to the top. The CIO organizing drives of the 'thirties split the old
union world and, largely in response to worker demands, gave
rise to new men of power, who for a historical moment seemed
free to choose new union alternatives.
But that happened when only 3.4 million workers were organ-
ized; now 15.4 million are members. Labor is so big, and the
legal requirements so much more complex, that the chance for
new types of leaders to emerge in connection with organizing
drives is rather limited. Of course, techniques and tactics of or-
ganizing may appropriately differ, and leaders possessing a rhet-
oric more congenial to white-collar employees may arise, but in
the natural course of affairs, older men already in power will se-
lect and encourage types of men not too different from them-
selves.
Established powers at established headquarters, and the men
they favor, will run the drives and probably manage any new
unions that are formed. New leaders will rise and old ones will
fall, but there is not much chance for white-collar unions to
emerge as a new type of organization or for new types of white-
collar leaders to gain great power.
II. The psychology of white-collar unionism, as we have seen,
is not different from that of wage- workers; in both cases it is ex-
pedient and instrumental, rather than principled or ideological.
Of course, unions of carpenters differ in shape and policy from
unions of auto workers or insurance salesmen or clerks. But the
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 317
common denominators of unionism are not divided according to
white-collar and wage-worker types.
A few speculations on either side of the issue, however, need
to be made. It can be argued that white-collar unionists will turn
out to be more cautious and less militant because the style of life
of white-collar people, as contrasted with that of workers in the
mass-production fields, throws them into contact with the gen-
eral (middle-class) culture, routines of information, and dom-
inant values. They have more chances to belong to other organi-
zations, so unionism will mean even less in their political and so-
cial lives than it has meant in the lives of steel, auto, or coal
workers. Because of their cleaner, more prestigeful work, and
their consciousness of the blue-shirted masses below them, they
will feel that they have more to lose from militant unionism that
might fail. Since many of them are of middle-class origin, their
biographical ties with entrepreneurial elements will restrain
them. Furthermore, since other white-collar employees are of
wage-worker origin and connection, the white-collar mass will be
divided in allegiance and hence waver in policy and action.
There is some truth in each of these points. But it is also pos-
sible to argue, with a measure of truth, that white-collar unions
will be more militant than wage-worker unions, because they
will be young at power bargaining and hence, at least for a while,
a taste of power will prod them to less disciplined and more
spontaneous movement. Having claims to higher prestige than
the wage-worker, having more links with the older middle class,
they will not 'take it' so readily, will be more likely to stand up
higher and fight harder. Since many of them have been depend-
ent upon their employers, once they break that allegiance and go
pro-union, their reaction against employers is likely to be
stronger and more aggressive. Since they are more highly edu-
cated, once they get the union slant, they will have a greater
capacity to generalize it, will be more politically and ideologi-
cally oriented in their unionism.
These points, too, have elements of truth. Yet neither view
stands up very well. Many of the factors in support of the idea
that white-collar unions will be more militant than wage-worker
unions rest upon the relative smallness and youth of white-collar
318 WAYS OF POWER
unionism. But compared with wage-worker unions of the same
size and age, they do not diflPer from them. Many of the factors in
support of the idea that white-collar unions will be less militant
than wage-worker unions rest upon differences that, in the course
of historical development, will quite likely be washed away.
The lesson from the historical experience of unionism in the
United States, which of course need not be a dogmatic lesson, is
that wage-workers and white-collar employees in due course
form the same types of unions, and that there is nothing peculiar
or distinctive about white-collar unionism; that variations in
terms of militancy among wage-worker unions and among white-
collar unions are just as slight as any other variations between
the two.
Trade unions, after all, are the most reliable instruments to
date for taming and channeling lower-class aspirations, for lining
up the workers without internal violence during time of war, and
for controlling their insurgency during times of peace and de-
pression. There are no reasons why unions should not perform
the same services among white-collar groups.
One historical fact, however, must be noticed: during the 'thir-
ties and early 'forties, larger proportions of white-collar than of
wage-worker unionists were in CIO unions controlled by Com-
munist party cliques. In the CIO, during 1948 about 4 out of 10
white-collar members were in CP controlled unions, whereas
only about 2 out of 10 wage-workers were. But that was only
within the CIO, which contains vastly more wage-workers than
white-collar employees. If we base our calculations on the union
world as a whole (including AFL and independents, as well as
CIO), we find that CP factions controlled about 6 per cent of un-
ionized white-collar workers and about 7 per cent of unionized
wage-workers.
That CP factions have controlled so many white-collar unions
within the CIO is more a historical accident of the CIO's devel-
opment than a sign that unionized white-collar workers are 'more
political' than wage-workers. It so happens that these white-collar
unions were mainly in larger cities, especially New York, which
has been the stronghold of the Communist Party in America.
Moreover, it is probably true that this party has appealed quite
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 319
strongly to the petty bourgeois mentality represented by many
sectors of New York's white-collar world.
III. The old radical faith that the mere enlargement of unions
is good because it brings more workers into 'organizing centers'
is now naive, as is the belief that winning the white-collar peo-
ple to unionism is necessarily 'a link to the middle class.' Both
ideas depend on the kinds of unions that prevail and what their
political potential may be. Both ideas have assumed that unions
are, or will be when they are big enough, engines of radical so-
cial change, that they will conduct themselves with militant in-
telligence and intelligent militancy.
The question whether or not the unionization of white-collar
workers will mean that labor has a link to the middle classes de-
pends upon the definition of 'middle class' and of 'labor.' The
question is inherited from the rhetoric of Socialist movements, in
which 'labor' means proletariat— a politically conscious group
separated from the rest of society, and assumed to be the motor
of all historic change— and in which 'middle class' means 'strata
with entrepreneurial ideology.'
But American labor, as expressed in unions, is now politically
a set of pressure groups, and white-collar workers, especially
when they join unions, increasingly assume the pressure-group
kind of labor mentality.
The question whether white-collar workers form 'a new mid-
dle class' or 'a new proletariat' is being answered, as we have
seen, by changes in both classes, as well as by changes in the
kind of organizations U.S. labor unions have become. Economi-
cally, the white-collar strata are less 'middle class' than has been
supposed; socially and ideologically, the wage-workers are more
'middle class' than has been supposed. In the bureaucratic scene
in which social change now occurs, organizations, not sponta-
neously alerted classes, often monopolize the chances for action.
And in the world of organizations and interest groups, the white-
collar and wage-worker strata come together in a kind of lower
middle-class pressure bloc.
Politically, the presence of more white-collar workers in labor
unions will give liberal and labor spokesmen a chance more truth-
fully to identify 'the interests of labor' with those of the commu-
320 WAYS OF POWER
nity as a whole. The mass base of labor as a pressure group will
be further extended, and labor spokesmen will inevitably be in-
volved in more far-reaching bargains over the national political
economy.
5. Unions and Politics
No matter what unionism may mean to the individual white-
collar worker, organizationally it brings the white-collar strata
into labor as an interest group. Unless white-collar unions de-
velop a distinctive program of their own— and there seems to
be no tendency in that direction— or unless the meaning of
unionism to them becomes politically distinctive— and it appar-
ently does not— white-collar unionism will carry the same mean-
ing as wage-worker unionism. Therefore, what white-collar un-
ions mean for America depends on what U.S. unions in general
mean.
So far, that meaning has been felt mainly in the economic
sphere, and there is no doubt that unions for white-collar work-
ers will increase their chance to have a voice in their conditions
of work and levels of pay. But the larger meaning of unionism in-
volves the question of democracy and labor unions, that is, the
question of whether the unions are to become a movement, or
whether they are going to become another vested interest, an
agency of political regulation at an economic price. Or, in the
words of Lionel Trilling, whether 'the conflict of capital and la-
bor is a contest for the possession of the goods of a single way of
life' or a 'culture struggle.'
For a long time the unions, considered nationally, were a set of
largely 'un-invested' organizations. Up to the middle 'thirties, they
were thought to be able to go either way: as a free movement,
they would grow bigger and yet retain their freedom to act, and
they would strive to act in a way that would re-order U.S. society
in the image of a libertarian and secure society; or as a set of
interests, they would attempt to vest themselves within the
framework of capitalist society and the administrative state.
Along this last road, unions might take stands on broader is-
sues, but only in bargaining with other vested interests. Their
spokesmen might talk of responsibility, but only in this mean-
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 321
ing: those to whom I say I am responsible are those whom I
seek to manage. The 'responsibility' of those who in gaining
power have become hampered in their action is often a respon-
sibility to regulate the discontent of the underlying strata, in or-
der that, as responsible spokesmen at the top, they may deal in a
more intelligent and practical way with other spokesmen.
The question of democracy and unionism is a question whether
in protecting the employees' economic position by an adroit
struggle among organized interest blocs, the unions will be
forced to become 'watchdogs' over the working of the economy
as a whole. And there is a second question: whether in being
watchdogs over the economy, as against being merely an interest
group within it, the unions will be forced to take on a larger cul-
tural and political struggle. We say 'forced' because present labor
leadership does not encourage us to believe that labor leaders as
a general rule will do so from any sort of conviction, much less
any vision of the need.
Historical experience, as well as the character of present-day
labor leadership, says No to these questions, but neither presents
a conclusive argument. Labor leadership changes, although
change is likely to be more difficult in the future than in the past;
and historical experience must be countered, in a balanced judg-
ment, by the mid-century facts of the social structure.
In the main drift of this structure, the point to watch is the
type and the extent of labor's involvement with business corpo-
rations and with the administrative state. How much free action,
just what kind, in what spheres, for approximately what ends—
these are the questions we must be asking ourselves about U.S.
labor in the coming decade. The main drift now involves four
coinciding trends:
(1) Economically practical conservatism, expressed by such
men as Robert Taft, is being overtaken and supplanted by polit-
ically sophisticated conservatism— a conservatism that is aware
of the political conditions of modern profit working and economic
power, and of the kind of softening co-operation with unions that
is needed to control them. ( 2 ) Liberalism, now almost a common
denominator of U.S. politics, becomes administrative liberalism,
a powerful and more absorptive state framework, within which
open political struggles are being translated into administrative
322 WAYS OF POWER
procedures and pressures. (3) The labor interest, coinciding with
sophisticated conservatism, is being vested within this adminis-
trative state and is in fact becoming one of its major supporting
pillars; labor is committed to the support of this state, and, in
turn, draws much of its strength from it. (4) All these develop-
ments are going on within the building of a total war economy
during an era with no treaty-structured peace in Europe or Asia.
U.S. labor, like U.S. small business, seems to be trying to fol-
low the route of the U.S. farmer. Once this farmer was a source
of insurgency of a kind; in the recent past, labor has seemed to
be such. Now the farmer is often a fat unit in an organized farm
bloc, firmly entrenched within and pressuring the welfare state.
Despite its greater objective antagonism to capitalism as a wage
system, labor seems to be trying to go the same way; its leaders,
following the policy of success, would apparently model the po-
litical role of their organizations upon those of the farmer. Talk
of farm-labor unity, which used to rest upon a unity of insurgents,
now seems to rest upon attempted bargains between two pres-
sure groups.
Unlike farmers, and unlike wage-workers, white-collar employ-
ees were born, too late to have even a brief day of autonomy; their
structural position and available strategy make them rearguard-
ers rather than movers and shakers of historic change. Their un-
ionization is a unionization into the main drift and serves to in-
corporate them as part of the newest interest to be vested in the
liberal state.
The story of labor in the Franklin Roosevelt era encouraged
hope because labor was then emerging for the first time on any
American scale; it had little need of any sense of direction other
than to 'organize the unorganized.' But in Truman's Fair Deal
this is not the case: not the mandate of the slump, but the farm-
er's fear that his enormous prosperity might be taken away from
him; not millions of unemployed, but labor's fear that Taft-Hart-
ley acts will be used against existing unions are the underpin-
nings of this administration. Then thought of war was not dom-
inant, and men of power could pay serious attention to the dis-
tribution of domestic power; now fear of war hangs over all po-
WHITE-COLLAR UNIONISM 323
litical speculation and deadens the political will for new domestic
beginnings.
There are counter-tendencies to the main drift, and there are
possible crises in the increasingly rigid structure that would unite
and allow these tendencies to assert themselves as historical
forces. But in the meantime, if the future of democracy in Amer-
ica is imperiled, it is not by any labor movement, but by its ab-
sence, and the substitution for it of a new set of vested interests.
If these new interests often seem of particular peril to democratic
social structure, it is because they are so large and yet so hesi-
tant. Their business may well become the regulation of insur-
gent tendencies among those groups and strata that might re-
organize American society out of its frenzied order of slump
and boom and war, and stop its main drift toward a society in
which men are the managed personnel of a garrison state.
15
The Politics of the Rearguard
The political psychology of any social stratum is influenced by
every relation its members have, or fail to have, with other strata;
all the objective and subjective factors to which they are exposed
play into their political psychology. Composed as they are of a
wide range of in-between occupational groups, the new middle
classes are especially open to many cross-pressures, as well as to
all those larger forces that more or less define the structure and
atmosphere of modern society.
To understand the political form and content of white-collar
mentality, we must first understand what political consciousness,
as well as lack of it, means; to understand how it has been
shaped, we must explore the effects on it of the mass media of
communication, of the social-historical structure, and of the
political institutions and traditions that have prevailed in the
United States.
1. Models of Consciousness
Our most familiar model of political consciousness is liberal-
ism, which in focusing upon the individual citizen has tried to
enlarge his political rights, his formal opportunities to act politi-
cally and to be political. It has assumed that once given the
rights, the individual citizen would naturally become politically
alerted and act on his political interests. It might be that he
would require more education, but education was one of the
rights that liberalism sought to make universal.
324
THE POLITICS OF THE REARGUARD 325
The difficulties of liberalism's assumption of the alert citizen
were well stated by Walter Lippmann in the early 'twenties. His
point was that the citizen was unable to know what was going on
politically, to think about it straight, or to act upon it intelli-
gently. There was a great gap between individual men, on the
one hand, and events and decisions of power, on the other; this
gap was filled by the media of communication, which, in their
necessity to compress the volume of communication into short-
hand slogans, created a pseudo-environment of stereotypes that
stood for the unseen political world and to which the citizen re-
acted. In the great society, the citizen had no time to study things
out, his politically fruitful contact with others as well as with the
media of communications being limited to fifteen or twenty min-
utes a day. These facts, in addition to those of artificial censor-
ship and the fear of facing realities that might disturb routine,
added up to this, that the political alertness required of the citi-
zen by liberal theory was based on a woefully Utopian, rational
psychology, which might make sense in a simpler democratic
set-up but was impossible in modern society. No one of liberal
persuasion has refuted Lippmann's analysis.
The other familiar model of political-consciousness, Marxism,
has focused upon the class rather than the individual. It is an in-
genious model which reaches from gross material conditions, an
chored in property, into the inner consciousness of men of simi-
lar class positions. Class-consciousness has always been under-
stood as a political consciousness of one's own rational class inter-
ests and their opposition to the interests of other classes. Eco-
nomic potentiality becomes politically realized: a 'class in itself
becomes a 'class for itself.' Thus for class consciousness, there
must be (1) a rational awareness and identification with one's
own class interests; (2) an awareness of and rejection of other
class interests as illegitimate; and (3) an awareness of and a
readiness to use collective political means to the collective politi-
cal end of realizing one's interests.
These three requirements interact in various ways, depending
upon the phase of the movement and the branch of Marxism one
examines. Lenin and Trotsky, for instance, placed more emphasis
than leaders before them on the party militants, who articulate
rational awareness, as a key to the development of mass political
326 WAYS OF POWER
consciousness. Yet, underlying the general Marxian model there
is always, in Louis Clair's words, the political psychology of lae-
coming conscious of inherent potentialities.' This idea is just as
rationalist as liberalism in its psychological assumptions. For the
struggle that occurs proceeds on the rational recognition by com-
peting classes of incompatible material interests; reflection links
material fact and interested consciousness by a calculus of ad-
vantage. As Veblen correctly pointed out, the idea is utilitarian,
and more closely related to Bentham than Hegel.
Marx, of course, allowed for 'false consciousness,' by which he
meant an untrue calculation of interests. He explained it as a
rationalist error, due to ignorance or, in more willful moods, to
a lack of correct proletarian propaganda. False consciousness, a
mental lag from previous eras, is no longer in line with present
interests; it is an incorrect interpretation which hides the real
world rather than reveals it in a manner adequate for effective
action.
Both Marxism and liberalism make the same rationalist as-
sumption that men, given the opportunity, will naturally come to
political consciousness of interests, of self or of class. Each
in its own way has been more concerned with enlarging the op-
portunities for men to play political roles than with any psycho-
logical unwillingness or inability on their part to do so. Since
one or the other of these models of consciousness usually under-
lies questions and answers about the politics of various social
strata, current theories do not usually allow for the view that a
stratum may have no political direction, but be politically pas-
sive. Yet such indifference is the major sign of both the impasse
of liberalism and the collapse of socialist hopes. It is also at the
heart of the political malaise of our time.
To be politically indifferent is to be a stranger to all political
symbols, to be alienated from politics as a sphere of loyalties,
demands, and hopes. The politically indifferent are detached
from prevailing political symbols but have no new attachments
to counter-symbols. Whatever insecurities and demands and
hopes they may have are not focused politically, their personal
desires and anxieties being segregated from political symbols and
THE POLITICS OF THE REARGUARD 327
authorities. Neither objective events nor internal stresses count
pohtically in their consciousness.
Political indiflFerence does not necessarily involve a collapse of
political expectation; it is not necessarily the end of a scale: hope-
ful, resigned, despairing, apathetic; that is only one route to it,
and one of its meanings. Nor is political indifference necessarily
irrational; in fact, it may be a reasoned cynicism, which distrusts
and debunks all available political loyalties and hopes as lack of
sophistication. Or it may be the product of an extra-rational con-
sideration of the opportunities available to men, who, with Max
Weber, assert that they can live without belief in a political
world gone meaningless, but in which detached intellectual work
is still possible. For men less burdened with insight and enjoying
less secure class positions, indifference frequently co-exists with
a minimum sacrifice of time and self to some meaningless work,
and for the rest, a private pursuit of activities that find their
meanings in the immediate gratification of animal thrill, sensa-
tion, and fun.
To be politically conscious, either in loyalty or insurgency, is
to see a political meaning in one's own insecurities and desires,
to see oneself as a demanding political force, which, no matter
how small, increases one's hopes that expectations will come off.
To be politically indifferent is to see no political meaning in one's
life or in the world in which one lives, to avoid any political dis-
appointments or gratifications. So political symbols have lost their
effectiveness as motives for action and as justifications for in-
stitutions.
2. Political indifference
In the United States in the middle of the twentieth century,
there are, of course, people who approximate the liberal view of
the citizen, especially among the educated upper middle class;
there are also people who are class-conscious in a Marxian sense,
especially among the upper ranks and, in a derived way, among
intellectuals. There are also people who display all the necessary
qualifications for political loyalty, and some who fulfil the re-
quirements for the insurgent.
328 WAYS OF POWER
But the most decisive comment that can be made about the
state of U.S. politics concerns the facts of widespread public
indifference, which today overshadow in significance both those
of loyalty and those of insurgency.
In our political literature, we do not have many attempts to
explain the facts of political indifference, perhaps because neither
liberalism nor Marxism raises the question to a central position.
Yet, we are now in a situation in which many who are disen-
gaged from prevailing allegiances have not acquired new ones,
and so are distracted from and inattentive to political concerns of
any kind. They are strangers to politics. They are not radical, not
liberal, not conservative, not reactionary; they are inactionary;
they are out of it. If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot
as a privatized man, then Ive must conclude that the U.S. citi-
zenry is now largely composed of idiots.
Our knowledge of this is firmer than any strict proof available
to us. It rests, first of all, upon our awareness, as politically con-
scious men ourselves, of the discrepancy between the meaning
and stature of public events and what people seem most inter-
ested in.
The Second World War was understood by most sensitive ob-
servers as a curiously unreal business. Men went away and
fought, all over the world; women did whatever was expected
of women during war; people worked hard and long and bought
war bonds; everybody believed in America and in her cause;
there was no rebellion. Yet it all seemed a purposeless kind of
efficiency. Some sort of numbness seemed to prohibit any aware-
ness of the magnitude and depth of what was happening; it was
without dream and so without nightmare, and if there was anger
and fear and hatred, and there was, still no chords of feeling and
conviction were deeply touched. People sat in the movies be-
tween production shifts, watching with aloofness and even visible
indifference, as children were 'saturation bombed' in the narrow
cellars of European cities. Man had become an object; and in so
far as those for whom he was an object felt about the spectacle
at all, they felt powerless, in the grip of larger forces, having no
part in these affairs that lay beyond their immediate areas of
daily demand and gratification. It was a time of somnambulance.
THE POLITICS OF THE REARGUARD 329
It was not that people were insensitive clods with no com-
plaints, but that in all the matter-of-fact eflBciency, no mainspring
of feeling was let loose in despair or furor; that no complaints
were focused rebelliously upon the political meanings of the
universal sacrifice and brutality. It was not that people in the
United States were apathetically dulled; on the contrary, they
were often brightly hopeful, but never politically so, and what
used to be called the deepest convictions seemed fluid as water.
It was as if the expert angle of the camera and the carefully
nurtured, pompous voice of the commentator had expropriated
the chance to 'take it big.' It was as if the ear had become a
sensitive soundtrack, the eye a precision camera, experience
an exactly timed collaboration between microphone and lens,
the machines thus taking unto themselves the capacity for ex-
perience. And as the world of this mechanically vivified experi-
ence was expanded a hundredfold, the individual became a spec-
tator of everything, rather than an experiencer of what he earned
by virtue of what he was becoming. There were no plain targets
of revolt; and the cold metropolitan manner had so entered the
soul of overpowered men that they were made completely private
and blase, down deep and for good.
Many observers have noted the decline of confidence in the
future that had prevailed in the United States fifty years ago, and
its replacement by apprehensiveness, pessimism, tension, 'spir-
itual disillusionment' with the social order. Some time after
World War I, American democracy, no longer a widespread con-
fidence and an authentic social feeling, became an objective for
oflBcial propaganda. It became official and conventional. Over the
last half century, Lloyd Morris has remarked, Americans have
become a people whose 'freedom, power, material advantages
and way of life are widely envied throughout the world; but
whose confidence, and faith in their future, have signally dimin-
ished.' There has been a parallel development of mighty prog-
ress and weak disenchantment.
The fact of formal democracy is not widely questioned, but the
way it has been drifting is. An anonymous comment on an Auden
poem concludes: 'All the committees and commissions ... in the
330 WAYS OF POWER
Federal Executive Departments and Agencies, all the employees
of all the states, counties, municipalities, townships, and villages,
are our employees and they manage oiu: affairs with our consent.
All the judges, all the police, are delegated by us to administer
a justice that they do not invent or improvise but that we have
invented over the centuries. . . We have our managers and they
... do not push us off the sidewalks. And they cannot forget us
because we can see to it that they lose their jobs. . . We have the
best system in the world, to be sure, but often we get to think-
ing that we are no more than spectators at a play— with the right
to watch the actors ( the managers ) come and go, the right to ap-
plaud and hiss, and even to put on other actors. But not the right
to put on another script. For the play seems to be written once
and for all— and not by us.'
'What appalls us is that it is not written by the managers
either ... it is not that [the two wars] came to us against our
will; it is that they came to us from some zone that was alto-
gether outside the possibihty of being affected by our will. The
wars came neither by or against our will. Our appointed man-
agers were at their posts; the wars enveloped them like fog drift-
ing in from sea. . . The agonizing question is. What do our man-
agers control? Without them, there is anarchy. With them there
is sometimes the feeling, not that they are remote from us, but
that the matter they handle— the matter of life and death— is
remote from them.'
It might be thought that our inherited standard of political
alertness is too high, that only in crises can it be achieved. But
this does not confront the problem at its true level, and lacks an
adequate conception of 'crisis.' Crises have involved the pub-
hcity of alternatives, usually forced alternatives. But what if the
authorities face and choose alternatives without publicity? In a
system of power as centralized as ours, 'crises' in the old-fash-
ioned sense occur only when something slips, when there is a
leak; and in the meantime, decisions of vital consequence are
made behind our backs. The meaning of crisis has to be made
clear before it can be hopefully asserted that political ahenation
will be replaced by alertness only in crises. For today there are
crises not pubhoized for popular political decision but which
THE POLITICS OF THE REARGUARD 331
carry much larger consequences than many pubhcized crises of
the past.
It is a sense of our general condition that lies back of our con-
viction that political estrangement in America is widespread and
decisive. There are, of course, shallower even though more pre-
cise indicators, for instance, the meaning and extent of the vote.
To vote is not necessarily to be politically involved; nor failure
to vote to be politically alienated. Perhaps as high as 80 per cent
of those who do vote feel they owe it to their families' tradition
of voting one way or the other. In the majority of cases the vote
indicates a traditional loyalty not to a set of principles or even
to a consistent party position, but to a family traditionally at-
tached to one or another party label. Voting does not typically
involve political expectations of great moment, and such de-
mands as it entails are formalized and not often connected with
personal troubles. Only a little over half of the people eligible
to vote do so, which means that the United States is a govern-
ment by default as much as by positive election: it is the 50 mil-
lion who do not vote who determine the outcomes as much as
those who do.
The upsurge of trade unionism, involving as it does about one-
third of the people at work, might be taken as an indication of
a rudimentary form of political insurgency. But trade unionism,
as we have seen, does not typically question prevailing symbols,
has not typically involved counter-symbols. Its usual demands
are for a larger slice of the going yield, and its conscious expec-
tations are short-run expectations of immediate material improve-
ments, not of any change in the system of work and life.
So, in their present shape and motives, neither patronage par-
ties nor trade unions are tokens of widespread political conscious-
ness, either of deeper loyalty or alerted insurgency.
The white-collar people are probably no more or no less politi-
cally alienated than other large strata; in fact, judging from the
indices available, they seem to be in-between. Thus, 41 per cent
of them, as against 59 per cent of the business and professional
and 33 per cent of the wage-workers, said they had given 'much
thought' rather than 'little thought' to the election for presi-
dency in 1948. In this, the white-collar proportion was the same
as the national average. The same is true with respect to partici-
332 WAYS OF POWER
pation in voting; every indication available reveals them as ex-
actly average, between business and labor.*
When it was believed, correctly or not, that the workers formed
an identifiable camp, it could be asserted that the white-collar
man was spiritually powerless because he could not find his way
to the workers at a time when the house of middle-class concepts
and feelings had collapsed. But whatever house the workers
might have been thought to be building has not been built. Now
there are no centers of firm and uniform identification. Po-
litical alienation and spiritual homelessness are widespread.
How has this political indifference come about? What are the
factors that regulate the state of political alienation in America
today? We cannot understand the political role of the new middle
class until we have explained why in the United States today
people of all classes are more or less politically indifferent. In
trying to explain it, we shall pay attention, first, to the political
contents and function of the mass media of communication; sec-
ond, to certain features of the social-historical structure of the
United States which have formed the character of its political
sphere; and third, to the salient characteristics of U.S. political
institutions themselves.
3. The Mass Media
To believe that 'the ideology wherein men become conscious
of class conflict and fight it out' is determined solely by 'material
contradictions' is to overlook the positive role of the mass media
of communications. If the consciousness of men does not deter-
mine their existence, neither does their material existence deter-
mine their consciousness. Between consciousness and existence
' Somewhat more than one-third of the white-collar people, polled
in the late 'forties, felt the Republican party best served their interests,
about one-third that the Democratic party did; the rest bebeved that
there was no difference between the parties on this point or had no
opinion. The 1948 poll vote by occupation is not considered reliable.
Analysis of the 1936, 1940, and 1944 presidential elections reveals in
each case that the white-collar vote was intermediate between the
extremes of business and unskilled labor. In 1936 (proportions for
Roosevelt): business, 47; white collar, 61; unskilled labor, 81. In
1940: business, 34; white collar, 48; unskilled labor, 69. In 1944;
business, 35; white collar, 49; unskilled labor, 59.
THE POLITICS OF THE REARGUARD 333
stand communications, which influence such consciousness as
men have of their existence. Men do 'enter into definite, neces-
sary relations which are independent of their will,' but communi-
cations enter to slant the meanings of these relations for those
variously involved in them. The forms of political consciousness
may, 'in the end, be relative to the means of production, but, in
the beginning, they are relative to the contents of the communi-
cation media.
In Marx's day there was no radio, no movies, no television;
there was only printed matter, which, as he demonstrated several
times, was in such shape that it was possible for an enterprising
individual to start up a newspaper or magazine. It was easier to
overlook the role of mass media or to underplay it, when they
were not so persuasive in effect and yet were more widely acces-
sible and, despite political censorship, more widely competitive.
What Edward Ross said of custom also applies to the mass
media today: their main prop is 'the dread of self-mutilation. For
to give up the customary [or the mass-media routine] is to alien-
ate portions of one's self, to tear away the sheath that protects
our substance.' Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic
strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and
aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is
equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the
mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal.
They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for
pre-scheduled, mass emotions.
In these mass arts, instead of form there is formula; they lead
'to no final revelation,' but exhaust themselves immediately as
they appear. As Milton Klonsky has observed, 'it is the great in-
distinction of both the mass arts and contemporary life that they
reflect one another so closely, feature by feature, it is almost im-
possible to tell the image from its source. Both collaborate to
form a common myth. . . The fictive heroes of this myth are the
archetypes to which the masses try to conform, and the dies from
which they stamp their own behavior.' We are so submerged in
the pictures created by mass media that we no longer really see
them, much less the objects they supposedly represent. The truth
is, as the media are now organized, they expropriate our vision.
There is the e\entful scene itself, the pictures of the scene, and
334 WAYS OF POWER
the response to it. Between scene and response is the picture,
given by the mass media. Events outside the narrow scene of the
weekly routine have httle meaning and in fact are mostly not
known except as they are omitted, refracted, or reported in the
mass media. The mass-communication system of the United
States is not autonomous: it reflects society, but selectively; it
reinforces certain features by generalizing them, and out of its
selections and reinforcements creates a world. In so far as people
live beyond their immediate range of contacts, it is in this world
they must live.
The forms and contents of political consciousness, or their ab-
sence, cannot be understood without reference to the world cre-
ated and sustained by these media. The deprivations and insecu-
rities arising from structural positions and historic changes are
not likely to be politically symbolized if these media do not take
them up in appropriate contexts, and thus lend generalized, com-
municable meaning to them. Class-consciousness or its absence,
for example, involves not merely the individual's experience in
and of some objective class-situation, but the communications to
which he is exposed. What he comes to believe about the whole
range of issues is in some way a function of his experienced situ-
ation, plus his first-hand contact with other people, plus his ex-
posure to mass media. And it is often the latter which gives him
his standard of reality, his standard of experience.
The contents of the mass media are now a sort of common de-
nominator of American experience, feeling, belief, and aspiration.
They extend across the diversified material and social environ-
ments, and, reaching lower into the age hierarchy, are received
long before the age of consent, without explicit awareness. Con-
tents of the mass media seep into our images of self, becoming
that which is taken for granted, so imperceptibly and so surely
that to modify them drastically, over a generation or two, would
be to change profoundly modern man's experience and character.
The world created by the mass media contains very little dis-
cussion of political meanings, not to speak of their dramatization,
or sharp demands and expectations. Instead, on the explicitly
tagged political level, the media display, the short news flash, and
the headlined column or snippet, the few round-tables and edi-
THE POLITICS OF THE REARGUARD 335
torials. In these, the mass media plug for ruling political symbols
and personalities; but in their attempts to enforce conventional
attachment to them, they standardize and reiterate until these
symbols and personalities become completely banal, and men are
attached to them only, as to a brand of clothes, by convention-
alized reaction. The whole marketing animus is put behind pre-
vailing cliches; politics is squeezed into formulas which are re-
peated and repeated; in the words of the advertising manual, you
'make contact, arouse interest, create preference, make specific
proposals, close the order.' *Ad drives' are set up 'to sell the U.S.
system,' with an 'agency task force' whose number one job is to
'stress the free enterprise aim' and 'point out to the American
people that management, labor and all other groups are agreed
that the American system should work towards the basic objec-
tive of better living . . .' and so on. The prevailing symbols are
presented in such a contrived and pompous civics-book manner,
or in such a falsely human light, as to preclude Hvely involve-
ments and deep-felt loyalties.
At the same time, the mass media do not display counter-loyal-
ties and demands to the ruling loyalties and demands which they
make banal. They are polite, disguising indiflFerence as tolerance
and broadmindedness; and they further buttress the disfavor in
which those who are 'against things' are held. They trivialize
issues into personal squabbles, rather than humanize them by
asserting their meanings for you and for me. They formalize ad-
herence to prevailing symbols by pious standardization of worn-
out phrases, and when they are 'serious,' they merely get detailed
about more of the same, rather than give big close-ups of the
human meanings of political events and decisions. Their detailed
coverage is probably not attended to except by those already in-
terested, the slanted material only by those already in agreement
with the slant. They reinforce interest and slant, but do not
arouse interest by exposing genuine clash. The ruling symbols
are so inflated in the mass media, the ideological speed-up is so
great, that such symbols, in their increased volume, intensifica-
tion, and persuasion, are worn out and distrusted. The mass
media hold a monopoly of the ideologically dead; they spin
records of political emptiness. To banalize prevailing sym-
bols and omit counter-symbols, but above all, to divert from the
336 WAYS OF POWER
explicitly political, and by contrast with other interests to make
'politics' dull and threadbare— that is the political situation of the
mass media, which reflect and reinforce the political situation of
the nation.
The explicit political content of the mass media is, after all,
a very small portion of their managed time and space. This
badly handled content must compete with a whole machinery
of amusement, within a marketing context of distrust. The most
skilled media men and the highest paid talent are devoted to the
glamorous worlds of sport and leisure. These competing worlds,
which in their modern scale are only 30 years old, divert atten-
tion from politics by providing a set of continuing interests in
mythical figures and fast-moving stereotypes. The old-fashioned
political rally, to which men traveled in the world of the small
entrepreneur, when politics were not crucial, is replaced by an
elaboration of dazzling alternatives to which men in the new
society, when politics are objectively crucial, can turn without
movement of body or mind.
The attention absorbed by the images on the screen's rectangle
dominates the darkened public; the sonorous, the erotic, the mys-
terious, the funny voice of the radio talks to you; the thrill of the
easy murder relaxes you. In our life-situation, they simply fasci-
nate. And their effects run deep: popular culture is not tagged as
'propaganda' but as entertainment; people are often exposed to
it when most relaxed of mind and tired of body; and its charac-
ters offer easy targets of identification, easy answers to stereo-
typed personal problems.
The image of success and its individuated psychology are the
most lively aspects of popular culture and the greatest diversion
from politics. Virtually all the images of popular culture are con-
cerned with individuals, and more, with particular kinds of indi-
viduals succeeding by individual ways to individual goals. Fic-
tion and non-fiction, movies and radio— indeed almost every
aspect of contemporary mass communication— accentuate indi-
vidual success. Whatever is done is done by individual effort, and
if a group is involved, it strings along after the extraordinary
leader. There is displayed no upward climb of and by collective
action to political goals, but individuals succeeding, by strictly
THE POLITICS OF THE REARGUARD 337
personal efforts in a hostile environment, to personal economic
and erotic goals.
Dramatization in popular art has always involved the personal-
ities of social life, even though an adequate picture of oppor-
tunities can be had only by statistically reliable portraits. It is
the individual exception rather than the mass facts, however,
which is seized upon, diffused, and generalized by the mass
media as a model criterion. The Horatio Alger stories of the news-
boy who made it' by reason of personal virtues may seem
merely corny to victims of impersonal depression, yet Mickey
Mouse and Superman are followed with zeal by millions, and
there is a clear line of connection between Horatio and Mickey.
Both are 'little men' who knife their way to the top by paying
strict attention to No. One— they are totem-like individuals who
are seen in the miraculous ritual of personal success, luckily win-
ning out over tremendous obstacles. Latter-day heroes of success,
however, have become sharper in their practices; they win by
tricks and often by stabs in the back; the fights they wage are
dirtier than Horatio's.
The cowboy and the detective, standard popular culture types,
are also out for No. One, although it is often necessary to sanctify
their violent methods by linking their motives to wider ends. But
they are autonomous men: T want to be my own man,' they say,
T want to do as I please.'
The easy identification with private success finds its obverse
side, Gunnar Myrdal has observed, in 'the remarkable lack of a
self-generating, self-disciplined, organized people's movement in
America.' Not collective adventures, nor even self-centered fan-
tasy, but other people's private success is often at the center of
popular-media attention. This generous romanticism of success,
resting upon an easy identification with those who succeed, un-
doubtedly lessens the psychological pressure of economic in-
equality, which otherwise might find collective outlet in political
action aimed at the social ideal of more equality of wealth and
power.
Only a few of the major characters appearing in the movies
pursue any social goals, the majority are engaged by ends lying
within their immediate circles. 'The interest in individuals,' Leo
Lowenthal comments more generally, 'has become a kind of mass
338 WAYS OF POWER
gossip.' This interest and the way it is satisfied and produced are
not, however, of the same type as in the novels of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The subjects chosen for popular biog-
raphies are no longer models in terms of which people may cul-
tivate themselves for serious individual endeavor; on the con-
trary, they are idols of leisure and of consumption, the concern
being with their private lives, valuable friends, hobbies, style of
consumption— on 'the psychological gadgets' with which they are
equipped for success. In their presentation, Lowenthal concludes,
'the language of promotion has replaced the language of evalua-
tion. Only the price tag is missing.' They are pseudo-individ-
uals displayed in an un-serious sphere of life. Their 'problems'
arise and are solved individually, by means of their own vices and
virtues, and such envy as they evoke is focused individually
rather than in terms of position in a social structure. Not indi-
vidual envy or collective resentment, but respect and awe adhere
to the glamour of individual success.
The contents of the mass media are frequently blamed on the
political ignorance of the public. It is true that only 21 per cent
of the public has 'a reasonably accurate idea of what the Bill of
Rights is'; that only about half claim to know what a lobbyist is,
and that many of these cannot recall any group who they believe
hire lobbyists, et cetera. Yet, in the past, the highly educated have
not held a monopoly on political alertness, much less on insur-
gency. Moreover, in connection with the political world of the
mass media, one must ask why is it that people are so ignorant,
given the tremendous volume of mass communication and the
increase in school populations.
The educational system is most appropriately seen as another
mass medium, a parochial one with an assured public of younger
age groups. In their most liberal endeavors, the political content
of educational institutions is often unimaginative and serves to
lay the basis for the successful diversion by other mass media, for
the trivialization, fragmentation, and confusion of politics as a
sphere of life. With their ideological dead-matter and intricately
boring citizenship courses, the schools cannot compete with pop-
ular culture and its dazzling idols. And when, realizing this, they
imitate such popular culture and its manner of presentation, they
THE POLITICS OF THE REARGUARD 339
too merely trivialize their subject, without making it much less
dull. The mass educated are perhaps the most politically unin-
terested, for they have been most exposed to politics in civics-
book detail. They have been dulled by being stuflFed with the
conventional idols of U.S. politics. Popular culture pervades all
classes of the American population, but perhaps, if only because
of the age and sex diflferences, it grips the white-collar girl and
the black-coated man most firmly. They are at the center of
the high-school culture at which the mass media are targeted,
and as a new lower middle class, they form an eager market for
the gross output.
Yet, why do mass-communication agencies contain such per-
sistently non-political or false political content? These agencies
are of course owned and directed by a small group of people, to
whose interest it is to present individual success stories and other
divertissement rather than the facts of collective sucesses and
tragedies.
But the fact that they are vested interests is not a sufficient ex-
planation for their content. Although it is not true that consum-
ers' tastes and feelings 'direct' their output, it is true that if
enough individuals felt able to boycott such programs, the movie
makers, the advertisers, and the personnel departments would in
some way seek to change their policies. It is also true that just
as many isolated, impoverished people do not have a conception
of adequate housing because they have never seen it, so most
movie-goers and radio listeners do not know what movies and
radio could be. People put up with their present content and
like it because they are not aware of any other possibility; they
are strongly predisposed to see, hear, and read what they have
been trained to see, hear, and read. Yet we cannot overlook the
social bases of their fascinated receptivity.
To understand the continued enthusiasm for present media
content, we must look beyond the psychology of apathetic and
uninformed individuals, and the vested interests of the agencies
of mass communication. The media do create, but they also rein-
force existing tendencies, cater to existing want. They do facili-
tate and focus impulses and needs there before them. There is
a close interplay between media and public, as wants are incul-
340 WAYS OF POWER
cated as well as satisfied. To understand the bases of public re-
ceptivity as well as the contents of the media, we must go beyond
the media as such, and examine the social-historical setting of the
U.S. political world itself.
4. The Social Structure
Explanations of a theme running as deep as political aliena-
tion must be made in terms of factors that extend over several
generations. For it arises from the very shaping of the total soci-
ety, and must be understood in terms of shifts over a period
of time which it helps to define as an epoch.
Many of the psychological trends we have examined in con-
nection with the transformation of the middle classes implement
indifference as a prevailing political tone. One of the character-
istic psychological features of the American social structure today
is its systematic creation and maintenance of estrangement from
society and from selfhood. Only against this broad background
can we hope to understand the specific factors that have focused
these trends in the political sphere.
The United States has been historically characterized by a
progressive boom of real income, broken only once on a wide
scale— the slump of the 'thirties— and climbing out of that to new
heights in World War II. At first a frontier expansion and later a
gigantic industrial elaboration fed this trend. As for wars, the
United States has been lucky to a degree that is unimaginable
to most Europeans. People experiencing such a histdry of increas-
ing and uninterrupted material contentment are not likely to
develop economic resentments that would turn their political
institutions into means of ideological conflict, or turn their minds
into political forums.
The discrepancy between want and satisfaction has not been
so wide and prolonged for any group as to affect vitally the gen-
eral tone of U.S. life. The possibilities for climbing have been
real for at least a visible minority, and political demands of lower-
income and occupational ranks have thus been minimized by
economic and social mobility. As small entrepreneurship began
to close, the white-collar opportunities opened up, which even
if they led to little more income were seen as above mere farm
THE POLITICS OF THE REARGUARD 341
and wage work. These facts have made for an acceptance of
stratification, which has not been experienced as a permanent
or oppressive arrangement, but as somehow natural and fair. If,
as Karl Mannheim has noted, the expectations of an inevitable
class struggle merely reflect an era of scarcity, in the United
States such ideas have not taken hold by virtue of the long era
of abundance.
To the economic facts of abundance, the rise in real standards
of living, and the upward mobility, there was added a relatively
fluid system of deference in a rising status market. Entering the
social structure at or near the bottom, each wave of the 35 million
immigrants who poured into the United States in the decades be-
fore 1920 took on for a while at least the difficult jobs and the
lowest esteem, thus lifting all the layers above themselves. Those
who had come before had somebody to look down upon. More-
over, the expectations of these immigrants, used in gauging their
satisfactions and discontents, were not of the top of U.S. society,
but rather U.S. society versus the homeland; their standards were
inter-national rather than inter-class. And their homelands were
lower in standard than the United States: for millions from Eu-
rope, America remained the "great land of promise, no matter
how low they were in the United States. Besides, given the vol-
ume of migration, it was not long before they, too, could find
newer or different immigrants to look down upon as competitive
menaces. The entire force of nationalism was thus behind the
idea and the image of individual ascent and against notions of
class equality. The Americanization struggle rather than the class
struggle was the central psychological fact. And the increased
chance for education, resting upon free institutions and changes
in occupational structure, was seen as an American cultural lift,
and nourished the feelings of status equality.
Immigrants added to a geographically immense and scattered
country the further heterogeneities of language, culture, religion.
And among the lower ranks such differences often seemed more
important than their common class and occupational levels. This
was a major blow at psychological, not to speak of political, co-
hesiveness of lower classes. To it, again, must be added the ex-
treme mobility between regions, industries, and jobs that has
been so extensive in America. The contrasts in occupational en-
342 WAYS OF POWER
vironments and the movement from one to another diversify and
even fragment the material conditions, and hence the bases of
potential solidarity. Consciousness of position and political will,
observes Edmund Wilson, have been more likely to be local and
sporadic than a 'social split that runs through the whole people
like a fissure. . /
The rapidity of change, resting on technological progress in a
large open space, has made for extreme diversity and mobility.
The people have not been 'settled' or fixed by tradition, and so
from their social birth they have been alienated. The status panic
and the salesmanship aegis have undoubtedly furthered this un-
settling process and further distracted the individual from politi-
cal demand and action as well as from himself. For the problem
of political apathy, viewed sociologically, is part of the larger
problem of self-alienation and social meaninglessness. It rests
on an absence of firm legitimations, and hence of accepted, du-
rable premiums for roles played— and yet on the continued, even
the compulsive, enactment of these roles.
Many of the historical factors and trends may now be at their
historical turning point or even end, but mentalities do not
usually keep in lock-step with history. Moreover, the political
order itself has not encouraged, and does not encourage, a politi-
cal mentality alert to new realities.
5. U.S. Politics
Political consciousness is most immediately determined by po-
litically available means and symbols. It is the political sphere
itself, its institutions and traditions, its rhetoric and practices, its
place in a total social structure, that must, after all, be in the
forefront of an explanation of political indifference. For these are
what political consciousness is about. In fact, all other factors in
the mass media and the historic social structure play into the
political sphere and there interact as a complex of causes.
Economic rather than political institutions have undoubtedly
been of greater importance to life endeavor in the United States.
Politics, in fact, has been widely understood as a means for gain-
ing and protecting economic ends and practices. The whole lais-
THE POLITICS OF THE REARGUARD 343
sez-faire tradition, so unevenly applied but so persistently as-
serted, has been the anchor and expression of this view. How-
ever inflated by rhetoric, 'political fights' have been less over
political principles than over economic and regional interests.
This political order has given rise to the patronage machine,
rather than the ideological party, to the trade union rather than
the 'worker's movement.' Party contests have been contests be-
tween varied types and sizes of property, rather than between
property and propertylessness, and unions have taken their place
within and alongside the dominant parties, rather than in oppo-
sition to them.
In short: U.S. politics has rarely been an autonomous force.
It has been anchored in the economic sphere, its men using po-
litical means to gain and secure limited economic ends. So in-
terest in it has seldom been an interest In political ends, has sel-
dom involved more than immediate material profits and losses.
If greater American statesmen on the national level, as Mat-
thew Josephson has asserted, have been concerned to adjust
larger business interests with the whole community, lesser poli-
ticians on the local levels have often been concerned to realize
smaller but more directly lucrative business ends. And some-
times this local bent has manifested itself on higher levels. Na-
tional scandals about the private morality of public men have
not done much to heighten the level of public sensibility or
deepen the image of political life to make it central, urgent, and
worth while.
Locally, as Robert and Helen Lynd have shown, t